Discover more from Last Mask Standing
Living in a Pandemic World
If you’ve seen my TED talk, or you read this newsletter, you know that I’m quite certain that COVID isn’t our last pandemic. We’re making global choices that mean we keep exposing ourselves to zoonoses - pathogens that spread from animals to people. At the same time, we’re not putting the systems in place that would give us early warnings of outbreaks. Wealthy countries have halfway decent surveillance systems to identify disease outbreaks fast, but lower-income countries do not. (More detail here.)
COVID may finally, finally, for the time being anyway, be on the wane. No devastating new variants are popping up. Prevalence is finally sloping down. We’ve got a couple of treatments that work and we’re finally seeing real research into the causes and effects of long COVID. This night be the beginning of the end for COVID, or it might be a breather. That is a gift.
But it’s not the end of infectious disease. We are now living in a world of pandemics. Some human, some animal, some both. As I have previously mentioned, we’re in a massive avian influenza pandemic right now. We’re also looking at current outbreaks of Marburg Virus in Cameroon, Tanzania, and Equatorial Guinea. (Marburg info here) And our old-school pandemics of HIV and Tuberculosis are still ticking right along - we’re verrrrry slowly decreasing their impact, but we’re not trying hard enough to bring them to an end in the near future. (this ancient first person account is still the best piece I have seen on drug resistant tuberculosis) We just saw a case of MERS in Oman.
Our job as 21st century humans is to find a way to live in this world of pandemics. Avoiding getting infected, and spreading the infection when disease does get us. Stay as sane as humanly possible. Keep pushing governments and corporations to do the right thing for humanity. Keep encouraging our friends and neighbors to do the right thing for themselves.
I will still be writing about COVID here. And I am still wearing a mask in public places. But I am also going to write about that core question. How do I go about being a good citizen - and a happy person - in this new pandemic world?
COVID links of interest:
Long COVID: What Do the Latest Data Show?
Microbiologists have just made a startling discovery about NYC rats