It’s interesting how going viral has two meanings now. There is what happens on the network, people see a post or picture or story and share it, and that’s good. Then there’s the Covid-19 kind of going viral that shakes us to our bones. A review of why the pandemic happened will come. But here is a sketch of some initial patterns that allowed Covid-19 to cover the globe.
Long time science writer Debora Mackenzie explains “The answer seems to be that stopping Covid-19 entirely might have taken faster action than any government could have managed. But earlier action was possible, and might have slowed the epidemic enough to make Covid-19 much less damaging and perhaps, just perhaps, kept it from reaching pandemic proportions,” explains science writer Debora Mackenzie, in her just published book Covid-19, The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One.
The author describes her first indication that an infectious disease was emerging. It was on Dec. 30, 2019 when someone had verified a story and sent it an old-fashioned online forum called ProMED (the PROgram for Monitoring Emerging Diseases). The red-topped bulletin was reporting people with severe, undiagnosed pneumonia in Wuhan.
The next night, Dec 31, Dr. Ai got test results that his case was a SARS coronavirus. He took a picture of the test results and shared it with eight doctors in a group chat, aware that what they were seeing threatened to become an epidemic. In January, these doctors were required by the authorities to write “self-critical essays about spreading rumors,” sending the message ‘this is unspeakable.’
ProMED is the world’s leading online reporting system for scientists. It is “run mostly by volunteers, working on a shoestring with grants and donations.“ It was set up in 1994, as infectious disease specialists shaken by the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s uneasily realized that other new diseases might be out there, and that we needed an early warning system,” says MacKenzie. The night of the Wuhan posting on ProMED, scientists on the bulletin board commented that the social media in Wuhan was reminiscent of the SARS outbreak in 2003. They waited to hear testing results. Finally on January 8, ProMED reported that China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) identified the cause of this pneumonia as a coronavirus, but said there was no person-to-person spread. In early January, when Wuhan officials knew the potential risk of a coronavirus outbreak, they obscured the rate of spread with a simple testing rule, someone could only be tested for the virus if they had been to the now closed fish market (an identified hot spot linked to early cases) or if they were linked to a known case. January 20th China disclosed the virus was contagious. “The Chinese scientists knew what they needed, Mackensie says, “Everything was there. Efficient spread. Need for tests. Pandemic potential. At that point countries around the world should have started intensively preparing for the virus to hit. Some did. Most did not.”
Well, in the case of scientists, they put up their own early warning bulletin board and talked collaboratively about what was known. Researchers, using airline data, tracked where the virus was likely to spread first, and the data were correct. The physicians in the hospital receiving the test results gathered together understanding the gravity of what they had to do. But institutions struggled to see past their own interests, not just in China, but in many countries. Disease and health security are in conflict with other priorities. And of course, institutions are run by people.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the pandemic a wake-up call “we have an opportunity now to do things differently,” he told the BBC. “It is clear the world is too fragile in relation to the global challenges we face. That fragility was demonstrated obviously with the pandemic.”
Getting our hands around changing the world is daunting for everyone. So the place to start is participate, with a diverse group, to learn systems applications in the place that is home.
This serves two purposes: learning and teaching how systems work; and improving a place. It’s true learning how systems work in order create desirable change is new to this era. But the idea of improving our place in the world is in our DNA.
There was a time before the pandemic, when acting in self-interest was noble, no conditions were necessary, it was understood. In the post-pandemic, hyper-connected world there is a new awareness of our vulnerabilities. There is a new imperative for acting – it could be called the pandemic facemask imperative, ‘I protect you, you protect me.
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