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November 23

Learning from history?

I was just reading about the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904. I was surprised to discover the parallels and similarities of mistakes made between this incident and the response to a public health threat in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States just 120 years later. Why do the same issues keep reoccurring? Is there no organization with institutional memory that would prevent the same mistakes from being made over and over again? Viriditas (talk) 20:40, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently not. Political expediency can and often will override the wise thing to do; it is what the movie Don't Look Up is about. For COVID-19, it did not help that it became a pandemic. The WHO has no mandate to enforce anything; they can only provide advice that governments and others are free to ignore. Also, leading epidemiologists did make serious mistakes, such as initially not understanding the role of aerosols in transmission and telling the public not to wear masks. --Lambiam 22:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A little more recently, though over a century ago, the so-called "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1920 is a reasonable parallel to the COVID thing. In some areas people refused to wear masks, and many of them died as a result. It's like asking why we don't stop fighting wars. It's because people forget how bad the last one was. Or to quote Merlin in Excalibur, "It is the doom of men, that they forget." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:37, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One of the reasons we had to fight the Second World War was that people actually did remember how bad the last one was. Had they forgotten we might have marched into the Rhineland in 1936 and put a stop to the little Austrian corporal's adventures. DuncanHill (talk) 22:42, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, characters like Hitler are immune to normal repulsion of warfare; in fact, they seem to like it, provided they're not directly in the line of fire. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:12, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm aware of the parallel to the Spanish flu, but when you look closer, the circumstances surrounding the 1900-1904 SF plague is much closer to what happened in the US under COVID-19. For example, the actions of California's Governor Henry Gage were similar to Donald Trump, while George Pardee took similar steps like Joe Biden. Joseph J. Kinyoun was their version of Anthony Fauci, and the hate directed against Kinyoun was very similar to the rhetoric against Fauci. The parallels are really unusual. Take a look at the article. Viriditas (talk) 02:19, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You find it unusual that people act like people? Human nature doesn't change over such a short period. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 04:32, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the worst behaviours of US politicians over COVID were replicated everywhere. Most other countries did much better. Human nature varies a lot. HiLo48 (talk) 06:30, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One of the issues that is being disclosed by the current UK Covid-19 Inquiry is that scientists can advise sensible measures, perhaps informed by previous pandemics, but those politicians in government are at liberty to ignore that advice if they choose. This is a shortcoming of democracy, although the ability of dictators to heed sound advice seems to considerably worse. At least our rulers in Britain have the good grace to submit their decisions to public scrutiny after the event, however, there is an element of stable door bolting in this process. Maybe next time... Alansplodge (talk) 15:32, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't want to distract from this discussion, and I very much appreciate your info, but I've often heard that the UK rates higher on indices of democracy than the US in many ways. I don't think most Americans are the least bit aware of this. Viriditas (talk) 07:42, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It seems difficult to compare and draw useful conclusions from the response to a plague outbreak in one city that killed 119 people to a global pandemic that has killed somewhere between 18 million and 33 million people. Cullen328 (talk) 07:55, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps it is apples and oranges like you say, but in 1900 the world population was 1.6 billion, the Wright Flyer launched in 1903, and commercial air travel was still twenty years away, so outbreaks couldn't spread as fast from the US to other countries like the 2020 global pandemic did. Viriditas (talk) 20:18, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's not just the US, it's everywhere. I've been wanting to read the book We Want Them Infected (review). The basic issue is that doing stuff to slows the virus down also slows economic activity, and decision makers want to keep the money moving. Plus there is a bunch of entrenched non-wisdom in the medical establishment: this is from 2021 and they are still not clued in. See covidisairborne.org for more info. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:0:0:0:6375 (talk) 08:50, 25 November 2023 (UTC) Added: this from 2021 was also good. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:0:0:0:6375 (talk) 09:47, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Question is: how much are you willing to spend to save one life-year? Or one happy life-year? That's the ethics question and it's up to the politicians to answer it, not to the scientists. The scientists need the answer to calculate what would be a good decision and what not – a calculation that's far from straight-forward. Problem is, you rarely get a clear answer about this from the politicians. Sometimes a thousand euros per life-year is too much, sometimes they're willing to spend over a million. In Western Europe, covid was, logarithmically speaking, on the expensive part of the scale. PiusImpavidus (talk) 17:27, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, most of the contributors above seem to take it as a given that the authorities under-reacted to Covid. That is at least something that is possible to discuss. Suppose there had been no lockdowns at all — what would have been the typical individual risk of death? Maybe one in 200? But you save a year. Do you expect to live 200 years?

Of course that's a very naive calculation for all sorts of reasons, maybe the biggest being the bit about "save a year". For me, the peak-pandemic-roughly-a-year was a pretty OK one, the main annoyance being not being able to travel, but other than that, a good remote job, stay at home with my wife, enjoy a pleasant town, what's not to like? I'm fairly introverted anyway; I didn't suffer so much from not having a wide physical social circle. So I don't think the lockdowns cost me a year.

But my situation was not really typical. And possibly the biggest cost, the long-term loss in educational achievement for a whole cohort of students, will not be fully known for a long time. --Trovatore (talk) 20:40, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There's dozens of other factors to consider as well. Somewhere around seven million people die each year from air pollution. The travel restrictions and lockdowns brought measurable reductions in air pollution for a short period of time. Viriditas (talk) 20:45, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, my second paragraph mentioned "all sorts of reasons". There are indeed a great many points that could be adduced both for and against the lockdowns. My point is that your question seemed (and I apologize if I misread it) to be taking it as clear that the restrictions were some combination of too late, too short, or not strict enough, and I think that is not in fact so clear. --Trovatore (talk) 20:52, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if research has been done on the (rather hypothetical) question whether a rapid coordinated response could have nipped the outbreak in the bud, before it assumed epidemic proportions. It appears rather obvious (to me) that the cost of such a response, both economically and in human lives, would have been far less than that of the pandemic. --Lambiam 08:29, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I don't know the answer to that. If memory serves, China did impose a pretty brutal "response" pretty promptly, but of course the virus had already spread to countries where you couldn't really do that.

Personally I don't want to live in a country like China. It's hard for me to imagine that the sort of state and social machinery capable of responding instantly to a pandemic, on warning, with a response that would genuinely contain such a contagious virus, wouldn't be repurposed for other things. I'd rather take my chances with pandemics. --Trovatore (talk) 16:22, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

China waited just less than two months, from the time they discovered the first patient cluster on December 12, to informing WHO for the first time on December 31, 2019, until the first restrictions were implemented on January 23. I don't think this was a prompt response at all. Viriditas (talk) 20:39, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And if the response had been prompt, it might have been much milder. For all I know, contact tracing and testing, isolating those found infected while urging those possibly still pre-symptomatic to be cautious in their contacts, might have done the job. Perhaps not, but it would be good if epidemiologists modelled various scenarios and estimated the associated likelihoods of containment. SARS was successfully contained without draconic measures, so a relatively mild response would not necessarily have been a lost cause. --Lambiam 21:00, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, yes, this would be interesting to see. On its face, Viriditas's response seems to strengthen my point, suggesting that for a country to be able to successfully contain this thing would have required it to be even more repressive than China.

I don't think the difference with SARS-1 is down to the response. It's probably more about the virus. SARS-1 was too virulent for optimal spread. People weren't really walking around infected.

Novel viruses show up all the time. Most of them don't amount to much. If every little blip is going to take away our freedom of movement, I don't think that's a very good outcome. --Trovatore (talk) 21:25, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think you and I have different interpretations of "repressive". I live on a small island. I first heard about what later came to be called COVID-19 in early January from a brief BBC report. No other media covered it until the end of the month. From January to December of 2020, I paid close attention to local reporting of cases. I saw a number of patterns play out in my local community: areas where people congregated had the most cases and clusters, particularly workplaces, churches, and large stores. This was somewhat underreported in the early days, but it became clear that it was a problem. One of the first major clusters we had in my area was with nurses in hospitals and other medical environments where management had expressly forbidden them to wear any kind of PPE because corporate believed it scared the patients and presented a negative image for the business. We saw this dispute about PPE occur across the US, with workers often being fired (many cases of this) for wearing PPE contrary to management. I’m presenting these examples (lack of social distancing and failure to wear PPE) because I don’t think requiring them would have been "repressive" in any sense of the word, so we clearly have very divergent views on what repressive means. Viriditas (talk) 21:39, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it seems rather clear that you and I have different views on the appropriate balance between liberty and safety. --Trovatore (talk) 21:43, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How does your opinion square with the multiple studies showing more conservatives and Republicans who "value liberty over safety" died from COVID-19 in red, GOP-dominant, US states, than liberals and Democrats in blue, Democratic-dominant states? Does this lend weight to the saying, "give me liberty or give me death?" Viriditas (talk) 21:56, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So there's a bunch of things in the mix here. At the very broadest level, naturally, if you think that the best way of living your life involves taking some risks, the dice are going to come up against you from time to time. Not much to see here.

At another level, some things have become bizarrely politicized. Refusing the vaccine, in particular, never made much sense to me; the statistics were extremely clear from the very early days. Here I'm not talking about vaccine mandates, just about the individual decision to get vaccinated or not, and I think some people were refusing it as a cultural signifier more than as a rational weighing of pluses and minuses. That bit doesn't seem to be about liberty, but about group identity. --Trovatore (talk) 22:12, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I follow the antivax movement pretty closely, and "liberty" is and always has been their primary justification for refusing the jab. It’s also the case that the same group of people are the ones concerned about the liberty of lockdowns, restrictions, and "repressive" pandemic responses, so much so, that it is an official talking point of the GOP (AP: "It’s been a favorite topic among some of the GOP’s top presidential contenders".) To summarize: the people politicizing it are the same ones talking about liberty. Which brings me to the idea that we should have the freedom of health, that is, in the context of American philosophy, the pursuit of happiness means freedom from disease. What I find so interesting about the people who spend time talking about "liberty" on the right (and let’s not mince words, that’s where 90% of the rhetoric originates), is that very few of them have any interest in liberty for people; their interest is solely devoted to economic liberty for corporations and the wealthy. Karl Friedrich Meyer (1884–1974) raised this concern with his students in his classes. One of his students recalled his lesson: "In the training of a number of us graduate students at Berkeley in the mid-'30's, the late estimable Professor K. F. Meyer told us of the concealment by the city fathers of San Francisco of an outbreak of human bubonic ("black") plague, concealment being in response to pressure of the city's business community which saw publication of plague's presence as a threat to business. It would scare away tourists and business travelers. Professor Meyer pointed out that groups with conflicts of interest, particularly groups which have a record of strongly materialistic behavior, do not characteristically think in the public interest in public health matters." Viriditas (talk) 22:49, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For the befit of those of us who don't follow US politics closely, the "GOP" is a nickname for the Republican Party. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 11:32, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The ones arguing about rights are perhaps unknowingly arguing for the "right" to infect other people, which would seem to be a violation of true libertarian philosophy. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:35, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that's a bit of a diversion from the point I was making. Liberty comes into play when you're talking about vaccine mandates. There are arguments to be made on both sides, but it clearly burdens people's liberty interests.

What I was talking about was the politicized nature of getting the vaccine voluntarily. That doesn't make sense to me as a liberty issue. It seems to be about cultural signifiers. --Trovatore (talk) 03:19, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. That is a most peculiar phenomenon. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:09, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Roma - Liverpool 1984 European Cup final

Hello. In the event of a Roma victory, in the light of the 'Vautrot scandal' in 1986 that saw the then Roma president Dimo Viola implicated, would the victory of two years earlier and the related trophy have remained with the Giallorossi? Thank you. 151.57.227.76 (talk) 23:17, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You're asking for speculation, which we're not supposed to do. Given UEFA's well-publicised issues with corruption in that period and how reluctant they were to sanction clubs (see UEFA#Sanctions and the section below it) I'd say they would probably not have taken strong action, unless it really suited UEFA to do so for some reason. But like I say, that's speculation --Dweller (talk) Old fashioned is the new thing! 10:07, 30 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]