Would have been a pretty straightforward response with maybe less statistics.
Increase production of masks and provide temporary assistance for people who would otherwise spread it at work. The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently, except that just-in-time logistics were only a result of the tech you're referring to. We would still have contract warehouses across the country and world that could store and distribute basic provisions with a little bit of planning.
Abundant visibility breeds a sense of abundant control, but when that sense goes beyond material reality we see technocrats fail.
Vaccines did help a lot, that's true, but that success doesn't really generalize across tech per se.
> The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently
No, the most we could say is millions of families could stay in touch across high-bandwidth lines; online shopping was already a reality that needed a bit of a scale up; secured remote work was possible for many millions of people; etc etc. Try and imagine the same pandemic, but no one has a laptop, all shopping is done in person apart from what Amazon already stocks, and that's only in a few countries, most things are paper based, and every home has sub-1Mb internet and no way of doing a video call at the push of a button.
It would be the same only lockdowns would be rejected even more than they were. The only reason people complied with lockdowns as much as they did is because they had the warm glowing warming glow of a screen in front of them supplying endless entertainment, information, and distraction. Take that away and people wouldn't comply with lockdowns the way they did.
Amazing how the countries without all those amenities ever made it out alive... you're conflating dependence on those technologies with necessity of those technologies.
> Amazing how the countries without all those amenities ever made it out alive... you're conflating dependence on those technologies with necessity of those technologies
Can you say where in this sentence I said that they were necessary for existence?
> Imagine a pandemic without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years.
> millions of families could stay in touch across high-bandwidth lines; online shopping was already a reality that needed a bit of a scale up; secured remote work was possible for many millions of people
Bringing these up in the discussion in this way implies that these outcomes were unachievable "without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years". I'm not so interested in some pedantic retroactive interpretation of your comment when it's clear from the tone and presentation that you intended this to be some reach toward a techno-utopian narrative of progress. My point is that that narrative hides within it the absurd notion that we can't do without these things, when obviously we can and it is really quite easy to imagine a pandemic being addressed adequately without those things in place.
Indeed in many ways some aspects of the response would have been more robust. I brought up just-in-time because lack of inventory as a buffer (of masks in particular, but also basic necessities) was a huge driver of the virality in the early days. With such a buffer it's feasible, plausible even, that we could have weathered the early days easier and anxious people could have had less severe overreactions to mask mandates and the like, and the total death count could have been 10% or 1% what it was without adequate reserves in place.
Increase production of masks and provide temporary assistance for people who would otherwise spread it at work. The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently, except that just-in-time logistics were only a result of the tech you're referring to. We would still have contract warehouses across the country and world that could store and distribute basic provisions with a little bit of planning.
Abundant visibility breeds a sense of abundant control, but when that sense goes beyond material reality we see technocrats fail.
Vaccines did help a lot, that's true, but that success doesn't really generalize across tech per se.