Basically let’s say everybody in the world is run by a single government who controls everything and they want to make the world healthier by eliminating common illnesses such as the cold, flu, and other diseases people catch and pass on but go away on their own.
So if the government quarantined everyone with a communicable diseases (and it’s able to quarantine immediately due to their vast network of spies and informants monitoring people for sicknesses) until it went away, then released them when they were better, could they get rid of the cold and flu completely within a month?
I would say it would be impossible and super costly. Many people are carrying around viruses and bacterial infections that are largely asymptomatic. Also what about children? Children are germ factories but this might be a good thing that helps build their immune system later in life. For instance there are studies linking early daycare attendance by young children with reduced risk of developing leukemia later. Overly protecting people from disease might actually cripple their immune systems, there is a balance.
Randall Munroe, of xkcd fame, addressed a similar matter in one of his “What If?” columns, unfortunately one I can’t find online. The question was whether the common cold could be eradicated if all human beings on the planet stayed away from each other for a few weeks (enough time for each individual’s immune system to get rid of the infection, but without infecting someone else in the meantime). His conclusion was that - logistics problems aside -, the plan would work if all individuals had a healthy immune system. If onlysome individuals, however, do not, then that person’s viral strains would, after the end of the quarantine period, spread to others and soon sweep the world again.
Well, we have managed to eliminate smallpox without a dictatorship and we came close a few years back with polio. Those both used vaccinations, not quarantine. A dictatorship would have made the polio eradication a snap, since it would be much easier to force people to get vaccinated. (There were a couple areas where it was a bad idea for medics to go where polio survived and spread from.)
So we could wipe out other vaccinable diseases, such as measles, with a dictatorship. Getting the ones where there is no vaccine would be more difficult.
Sorry, hate to fight the hypothetical, but for whatever reason, I have a problem with it. If your global givernment has enough control to be able to completely eradicate a disease through vaccination, they likely don’t need a vast network of spies. If they need a vast network of spies, they likely won’t be able to eliminate the disease fully, to my way of thinking.
If you concede switching “spies” for “magic wand of choice”, well, for flu viruses, maybe, colds mmmmaybe if you devoted resources to developing vaccines for all the known viruses but that would be like the flu, an ongoing thing. Other diseases with a lower mutation rate, yes more likely.
The OP specifically asked about eliminating the cold and the flu. There is no cold vaccine, and flu vaccines are far from 100% effective, even against the strains they’re designed for.
I’m gonna take a WAG here and say that even if the quarantine period did end all visible cold and flu outbreaks (and I have no idea if it would or not), some people are asymptomatic germ-carriers who could pass the germs on to others without being identified and put into isolation.
Randall Munroe did this one in his “What If?” book. You’d have to quarantine everybody in the world from everybody else, long enough for every single person with the cold to get over it entirely (and that could be a long time for people with weak immune systems) without passing it on to a new host.
At that point, you’ve successfully eradicated those viruses, but you’ve also destroyed the global economy because everyone was sitting around in quarantine rather than growing food and running power plants.
You would also not be eliminating those illnesses that have an nonhuman animal reservoir; new strains of influenza enter the human population from swine and avian hosts. Not to mention all the insect-vector illnesses that aren’t transmitted from human to human, like West Nile virus, etc.
Actually, if you did this just for HPV alone, while creating a whole host of other problems, you would be solving many other issues than just disease.
When I googled how common HPV is world wide the answer seems to be 80% of sexually active people knowingly and unknowingly carry the virus.
So, initiate 100% testing of the populace world wide and eliminate just those with HPV and you solve overpopulation, potentially hunger, pollution just to start.
There is a vaccine for HPV now. It apparently doesn’t cure people who have it but does prevent its transfer to people who don’t. Forcing everyone to get it before they become sexually active will eventually elliminate the disease. So murdering everyone with it is going just a tad bit overboard, don’t you think?
From the Center for Disease Control’s page on influenza with original bolding:
It’s not just a matter of some people being relatively asymptomatic. Most healthy adults become contagious before symptoms appear. That’s a tough nut to crack if the response doesn’t begin until visible symptoms present themselves.
Yeah, the problem with quarantine as a solution is that everyone is still vulnerable. So you have to really get every last virus particle dead or it’s easy to transmit all over again.
The nice thing about vaccination is that most people end up resistant, which means that future outbreaks will not spread as well.
The problem is that there are so many viruses that cause a common cold, so it’s hard to know which one to vaccinate for. It’s not economically effective to develop. It’s also not clear if the immunity lasts.
I was always under the impression that cold viruses mutated quickly enough that even if you had already caught one, by the time it came back around it was different enough. But if you really can just get vaccinated for all 100s of strains, then that’s something that cold be solvable with medical advances.
Quick vaccine production and sequencing of local cold viruses could let people quickly get a vaccine for nearby viruses, and might drastically reduce the incidence. A sufficiently advanced and benevolent dictator might be able to stamp it out.