Is it really unpredictable to prevent pandemics to happen?
Recently I was reading an article about how the spread of new pandemics could be prevented. We as humans always tend to believe the first thing that is written or published and stick with the idea.
When we’ve tightly wrapped our identity around an idea, we no longer have an opinion. We are the opinion.
Humans also have a hard time tolerating ambiguity. We find it much easier to land in simple, rigid categories and stay there. Meditation is good. Meditation is useless. College is essential. College is pointless. War is good. War is bad. Instead of seeing all the grey between these extremes, we reject any evidence that introduces doubt. From this perspective, it’s better to suppress peer-reviewed information about the potential adverse effects of meditation than to distort a neat, one-dimensional picture that paints meditation as a universal good.
We do this with people too. We divide the world into heroes and villains, oppressors and oppressed. In our misleading narratives, you can’t expect anything good from the bad, or anything bad from the good. This is the standard Hollywood template: The hero defeats the villain, and everyone lives happily ever after. And it works — because it appeals to human nature.
Pandemics are not new. We have historical records on the effects of pandemics dating from as early as 3000 BC. Between 1348 and 1350, the Black Death killed a quarter of the population in Europe. A century later, European diseases killed large numbers of Indigenous people in what is now known as Canada and the rest of the Americas.
The 1918 Spanish flu caused around 50 million deaths worldwide. Since then, we have suffered deadly outbreaks of smallpox, pertussis, Ebola, SARS, Avian flu, and many others.
Although natural observations and social experiments allow us to study past diseases and their patterns, this is not enough to prevent future crises. To efficiently predict the spread of a disease, there is a clear and urgent need for new tools and methodologies that can easily assimilate possible factors, such as weather patterns and human behavior.
When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system. The city’s drinking water was intermingling with human waste, spreading bacteria in one deadly outbreak after another. A new comprehensive network of sewers separated the two. London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape. ( Here is the link to the article Link )
If we could provide clear predictions on which social behaviors would affect the spread of a certain disease, policy-makers would be in a better position to develop improved pandemic response plans. Researchers are building new prediction models and running simulations to study how to deal with the current outbreak.
