Hopefully, the U.S. government (federal and state level) will take away the lesson from Covid that the next time a pandemic like this strikes, it’s better to err on the side of being too severe than too lenient.
I think when the next pandemic comes around, many state governors are going to implement something akin to martial law and the travel bans will come much sooner, and there will be much less societal tolerance for people who deliberately refuse to wear masks or what not. (At least, one hopes.) The stubborn 30% will still be there, but they can be arrested or cracked down on much harder.
We may get our chance with THIS outbreak, as I’ve been hearing more and more we need to lock back down, to reset back to that, and look at how we might do a gradual unlocking, once the numbers are back under control, moving forward. Plus, there is always that second wave that is postulated as being in the fall or early winter…which isn’t that far off. Plus, it will be flu season, so that should make it extra fun.
When the next pandemic comes around, maybe Mamaw will tell the tribe that the sick coughing people have to go downriver and live in the old abandoned caves until they get better or die there.
I know we don’t want this to become a partisan political debate, but many other countries have handled this pandemic well. At the risk of stating the obvious, the problem has not been that we needed to go through one pandemic to learn what to do, the problem is that our current Federal administration and some state administrations (and, of course, a third of our populace) have no interest in facts or science that don’t fit their narrative. And none of them have admitted having made any mistakes, none of them have taken any responsibility for the severity of the crisis.
Heck, we’re not even taking a coherent, unified, severe enough approach while we’re still in it. No reason to assume we’ll handle it differently next time.
"And, unlike handkerchiefs and paper tissues, which Tomes says people began to use more regularly because of the pandemic, mask-wearing did not catch on in the United States after the ordinances ended. It’s still difficult to say how effective mask-wearing on its own was in 1918 and 1919. What is clear is that communities that implemented stronger health measures overall fared better than those that didn’t.
“Today we can look back and see that they flattened the curve and the communities that did enforce much stricter regulations and for a longer period of time and began earlier had lower death rates,” Bristow says. “But they didn’t have that data tabulated yet, so I think in the aftermath it wasn’t as clear that what they had done had been effective.” https://www.history.com/news/1918-spanish-flu-mask-wearing-resistance
So basically we are still jackasses who don’t want to be lead to water whether by force or evidence.
Do you really, really trust your government officials to use “something akin to martial law” appropriately? All of them? What happens when some authoritarian type uses an Ebola outbreak in Africa or something as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protest?
Edited to remove political commentary not really appropriate for this forum
