> Same as with pandemic, in 10 years, if the new virus strikes, governments around the world we clueless.
SARS in 2004 primed Hong Kong for a robust virus response in 2020. As much as the HK government gets wrong, they've done a really good job so far with SARS-CoV2. We have 7.5 million people, and about 120 deaths so far from SARS-CoV2.
Though, a lot of this boils down to the fatality rate of the original SARS being something like 10%, so it was more terrifying but ultimately less dangerous on a population level due to lower transmissibility.
And we have a global mindset in Europe, right? So we could have learned from others. But somehow nobody invested in contact tracing infrastructure, PPE production, etc. Why? Because you can't justify more spending for something that "could happen". There's an enormous tax burden already in the EU, and governments will be struggling even more with healthcare costs in the next decades. I doubt someone will stockpile millions of KN95 masks "just in case" after the pandemic is over. Because that costs money.
East Asia in general has done really well with Covid. In the US, I fear that nobody will learn anything from Covid. Those who treated it as nothing more than the flu will come out of this feeling that they were right all along and treat the next pandemic exactly the same way. There was one guy interviewed at the Trump rally in Tulsa who had a friend die from Covid and still went to a rally without a mask saying he didn't know what to think about the pandemic.
On the flip side, it is a technological miracle that 1 year and a day after I was last in the office, I was able to get my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine (or, for that matter, that a vaccine even existed).
SARS in 2004 primed Hong Kong for a robust virus response in 2020. As much as the HK government gets wrong, they've done a really good job so far with SARS-CoV2. We have 7.5 million people, and about 120 deaths so far from SARS-CoV2.
Though, a lot of this boils down to the fatality rate of the original SARS being something like 10%, so it was more terrifying but ultimately less dangerous on a population level due to lower transmissibility.