[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by h8kurdt

This shit is just gonna run on, and on, and on, isn't it.

Again from Zakaria's newsletter (July 1):

The Forever Pandemic

The pandemic may feel like it’s waning in some places, but numbers tell a different story, Adam Tooze writes for The Guardian, as the World Health Organization noted almost 190,000 new cases worldwide on Sunday. (Yesterday, that figure was just under 164,000; the US alone could see 100,000 new cases daily under current trends, top government epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested this week.)

Some of the rise can be attributed to more testing, Tooze writes, but “the crisis is not yet over. Far from it. Even as east Asia and Europe begin to experience recovery, the momentum of the disease at the global level is building. Nor is this the famous ‘second wave’. This is still the first wave spreading out across the world’s 7.8 billion inhabitants.”

Disturbingly, Tooze posits that Covid-19 could linger indefinitely: “[A]s the disease spreads to Latin America, Africa and south Asia, a grim new hierarchy threatens. The disease will divide those that are rich, and thus in a position to ‘cope’, from the rest. Covid-19 may become another of those ‘poor-country diseases’ that kills hundreds of thousands in a regular year. Think malaria or TB, but more infectious and thus requiring more rigorous social distancing.”

Given the globalized movement of people for work, Tooze sees this as a problem for everyone, not just the developing world.

Pandemics End When We Say They End

Won’t a vaccine put a definitive end to Covid-19, at some point? Maybe not, according to science historians Jeremy A. Greene of Johns Hopkins and Dora Vargha of the University of Exeter, who trace the “ends” of epidemics in a Boston Review essay, finding them ill defined.

Diseases rarely disappear completely, Greene and Vargha note: Smallpox is the only one to have been eradicated on purpose. Most, like HIV/AIDS, polio, and tuberculosis linger on. Even once there’s a vaccine, as is the case for polio and TB, distribution and uptake are uneven. “In Kano, Nigeria, for example,” they write, “a ban on polio vaccination between 2000 and 2004 resulted in a new national polio epidemic that soon spread to neighboring countries. As late as December 2019 polio outbreaks were still reported in fifteen African countries, including Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Epidemic “endings” are also social events, they write, apart from case rates and biological realities—meaning epidemics are over, as such, when we collectively decide they are. Sometimes, that means they drag on past their biological expiration dates, as fearful reactions lead people to keep experiencing a disease that’s gone: After the 1918 influenza pandemic, Greene and Vargha write, “[e]ven as late as 1922, a bad flu season in Washington State merited a response from public health officials to enforce absolute quarantine as they had during 1918–19. It is difficult, looking back, to say exactly when this prototypical pandemic of the twentieth century was really over.” In other cases, it means they just fade away. The AIDS epidemic never ended, but it did give way to lessened concern among those “no longer directly threatened” and came to be accepted by some as “a chronic disease endemic,” Greene and Vargha write. “More than 9,000 cases of tuberculosis were reported in the United States in 2018—overwhelmingly affecting racial and ethnic minority populations—but they rarely made the news.” For some, the social events of the HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics ended when those diseases stopped being newsworthy.

“At their worst, epidemic endings are a form of collective amnesia, transmuting the disease that remains into merely someone else’s problem,” Greene and Vargha conclude. “There will be no simple return to the way things were: whatever normal we build will be a new one—whether many of us realize it or not.”