02-13-2021, 03:27 PM
And this situation illustrates why technological advance is a good thing, and also why it causes problems.
Covid-19 spread as fast as it did, because of transport technology; specifically cheap air transport. But consider a counterfactual:
The virus jumps from bats to humans in 1990 or maybe 1989, instead of 2020 or maybe 2019. It spreads about as fast as it did in RL, maybe a bit slower because that area of China wasn't as developed then. And what happens next?
Well, for a start, we don't get to hear about the new virus for a lot longer, because the technology to do the characterisation was nowhere near as advanced. So it spreads undetected (or at least undetected as being new) for a lot longer. And:
The prospect of a vaccine is years off, not months. (Genome sequencing and so on were nowhere near as good.) So the only realistic way of containing the plague is really brutal quarantine measures; something like what New Zealand did, or more so. Including the virtual shutdown of the airline industry and closure of just about all passenger ferries.
The effect of the virus is a lot worse, because medical monitoring is a lot less effective and more expensive.
The higher numbers of casualties mean that treatment for other medical problems is affected a lot more.
There has to be a very difficult choice made, regarding an internal lockdown in (for example) the UK. In 1990, a lockdown like the one enacted in RL would utterly devastate the economy - because internet trading was in its infancy, and the technology for home working was not as available, far more expensive and not as good. The choice to be between wrecking the economy and killing hundreds of thousands of people by not locking down.
So: Only thirty years ago, this bug would have killed half a million Brits, wrecked the economy for a decade or more, and possibly caused a war. (Economic disruption on that sort of scale does that.)
That's why high technology is a good thing. Comments?
Covid-19 spread as fast as it did, because of transport technology; specifically cheap air transport. But consider a counterfactual:
The virus jumps from bats to humans in 1990 or maybe 1989, instead of 2020 or maybe 2019. It spreads about as fast as it did in RL, maybe a bit slower because that area of China wasn't as developed then. And what happens next?
Well, for a start, we don't get to hear about the new virus for a lot longer, because the technology to do the characterisation was nowhere near as advanced. So it spreads undetected (or at least undetected as being new) for a lot longer. And:
The prospect of a vaccine is years off, not months. (Genome sequencing and so on were nowhere near as good.) So the only realistic way of containing the plague is really brutal quarantine measures; something like what New Zealand did, or more so. Including the virtual shutdown of the airline industry and closure of just about all passenger ferries.
The effect of the virus is a lot worse, because medical monitoring is a lot less effective and more expensive.
The higher numbers of casualties mean that treatment for other medical problems is affected a lot more.
There has to be a very difficult choice made, regarding an internal lockdown in (for example) the UK. In 1990, a lockdown like the one enacted in RL would utterly devastate the economy - because internet trading was in its infancy, and the technology for home working was not as available, far more expensive and not as good. The choice to be between wrecking the economy and killing hundreds of thousands of people by not locking down.
So: Only thirty years ago, this bug would have killed half a million Brits, wrecked the economy for a decade or more, and possibly caused a war. (Economic disruption on that sort of scale does that.)
That's why high technology is a good thing. Comments?