This is the New Normal
And it sucks
It has been two and a half years since COVID hit the US full force. We need to recognize that this is the new normal. The life we have now - that’s the life we have from here on out. It’s time to stop waiting for magic around the corner. Vaccines and treatments for COVID will get better. I am confident of that. I even believe that we’ll eventually have a vaccine that protects against most if not all variants. But that will take a while to develop. And I strongly suspect that by the time we develop that vaccine, there will be another pandemic pathogen sweeping the planet. Here’s why:
There’s a reason we’re seeing COVID now. And monkeypox. Well, a network of reasons.
Most serious pathogens are zoonoses – germs that infect both animals and people, and can spread back and forth between animals and people. AIDS and Tuberculosis are zoonoses. Ebola is a zoonosis. Monkeypox is a zoonosis. Bird flu, of course. Plague, Lyme disease. Rabies, duh. Zika. Yellow fever. And COVID. There are more but I’ll stop here.
There are a lot of zoonoses that are very dangerous to people. We are usually spared, because with most zoonoses people just don’t come in contact with them. They’re in small wild animal populations and we don’t run into them. Until we start cutting down all the wilderness to turn it into farms or roads or houses.
Ebola crossed over into people from bats as a result of the African bush being cut down and farmed. It put people right in contact with infected bats. Bird flu gets spread when wild birds run into poultry farms and then it spreads right through farmed birds and into the people who take care of them. (PSA: DO NOT HUG YOUR SICK EMU)
We’ve been lucky, with bird flu so far, by the way. Birds can give it to people, but so far it doesn’t spread person to person. Bird flu is dangerous. Way more fatal than COVID-19. When it evolves to spread person-to-person it is going to be so bad. We’ve also been lucky with Ebola, because it’s very deadly and doesn’t have a long incubation time. You get infected, you start showing symptoms, and then you either die or get better. You don’t have much time to infect a lot of people. (1)
So, we are eliminating all the wilderness. We made their space into our space, and now all the wild animals are living there in our space giving us all their wild animal diseases. Then you layer globalization on top of that. So when one person gets an awful wild animal disease, they can then spread it all over thanks to roads, trains, air travel. Outbreaks do not stay local.
I gave a TED talk in March 2020 and said COVID was just the first of many pandemics, and now we’ve had Monkeypox to prove me right. (2) Monkeypox isn’t going to be the last one either. I have some guesses on what will be next, but I guarantee Monkeypox isn’t the last one. (3)
So, that was bleak. But facing the truth means we can respond to the real situation, not the fantasy we’d like to believe in. And there are in fact things we can do. We can lobby and vote for wildlife protections, and support environmental conservation around the world. (I can vouch for Oceanswell and the Fishing Cat Conservation Alliance.) We can support global health equity to stop pandemics faster. We can keep taking personal safety precautions as we move through the world, and we can use actual information in our risk analysis instead of daydreams.
PS: A lot of people have asked me to dig deeper into COVID denial and misogyny. I hear your requests and I am working on it!
Except this appears to be changing. Maybe our luck has run out? My own best guess would be it’s spreading through sewage.
For the record, I hate being right. I have children. I want to be wrong on this and most things. I always always want the world to be safer and better and nicer than I predict.
For those of you who have read – or heard of – Bill Gates’s new book called The Last Pandemic, he doesn’t disagree with me on this part. He thinks the new diseases will keep coming. He just wants to stop them before outbreaks become pandemics.