It should be clear that acting early in a pandemic is like acting early to put out a fire. Minister Hancock yesterday made similar statements as part of the UK inquiry: 1/ bbc.com/news/live/cm... - ThreadSky

yaneerbaryam.bsky.social • 93 days ago

It should be clear that acting early in a pandemic is like acting early to put out a fire.

Minister Hancock yesterday made similar statements as part of the UK inquiry:
1/
https://bbc.com/news/live/cm2mpg1ljrdt?post=asset%3A85d4ab14-380a-483a-9e22-7b8226d25d86#post

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yaneerbaryam.bsky.social•93 days ago

"Matt Hancock has again voiced his strong opinion that early lockdowns are essential in the event of a dangerous pathogen spreading.
He told the inquiry that those who understood the consequence of waiting before bringing in necessary measures should unite to win the argument.
2/

yaneerbaryam.bsky.social•93 days ago

He said there were some who were arguing that lockdowns in future should be avoided but this was “false, wrong and dangerous”.
He argued that there should be a national debate now on an immediate response in the event of a future pandemic emerging."
3/

alvelda.bsky.social•93 days ago

One foundational component of optimal pandemic response is the quality, breadth, and timeliness of surveillance testing infrastructure.

Early lockdowns had to be so large-scale & disruptive because we had no granular disease surveillance at a local scale to more precisely target abatements. 1/4

lucidus-dfc.bsky.social•92 days ago

Bottom line - you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Why this is such a failing of governments I don’t know.

alvelda.bsky.social•93 days ago

Sadly, watching the as-yet bumbling and inadequate early phases of H5N1 Bird Flu testing, makes clear we haven’t applied lessons from 5 years of COVID & are repeating the mistake of waiting til it’s too big to contain before doing anything about it because we don’t know where it is. 2/4

alvelda.bsky.social•93 days ago

When the West realized that nuclear weapons could kill millions of people at a time, we spent trillions of dollars building a global nuclear weapon monitoring system complete with ground-based radiation detectors and satellite surveillance. 3/4

alvelda.bsky.social•93 days ago

Well, now, a virus has killed tens of millions of people and has permanently debilitated over 400 million (according to the latest work by @zalaly.bsky.social ), far more than any nuclear weapon.

Shouldn’t we be mounting an appropriately scaled international surveillance infrastructure effort? 4/4

citizenharry.bsky.social•93 days ago

It's a paradox - when you do the right things for prevention & rapid treatment, often they're very effective, the harm is minimal, & those inconvenienced complain that you're the boy who cried wolf.
But when we wait for everybody to agree it's worth sacrificing to stop, it's much less effective!

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