1) We are due for another pandemic. If this one isn't it, there will be another.
2) Democracies run on public opinion. Right now everybody is riled up about some homicidal idiots in Iraq. This is off their radar. Hundreds of thousands of people die from some natural cause or another all of the time. It's not a huge spectacle on YouTube.
3) The enemy really isn't Ebola. Ebola is just the opportunistic pathogen that came along. The enemy is really weak governments with little or no public health systems, combined with very poor local sanitation practices.
4) There was a time when air-dropping in a thousand healthworkers with tent hospitals might have stopped this. That time is over. Now it's in the big city, and trying to control or service a population of several hundred thousand is beyond most any country's ability to project intervention.
5) If it doesn't go airborne and stay lethal, which is where the safe money currently is, we'll end up with hundreds of thousands or millions dead and it should burn itself out over the next year or two. That's the optimistic scenario. We have no reason not to believe that's the way it's going to play out.
6) If it goes airborne and stays lethal, we're in for a major shitstorm. But I really don't think second-guessing how we responded will be useful. There are different countries in the world. They have different governments. We do not have one world government, nor do most of us want one. That means that there are always going to be large pockets of humanity where something like this can take off. Structurally humanity is huge. Disease is going to be an issue for us for a long time.
Saying that we're due for another pandemic is quite simply the gambler's fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy . The odds of a pandemic may well be higher than recent experience would indicate, but pandemics still occur randomly.
1) We are due for another pandemic. If this one isn't it, there will be another.
2) Democracies run on public opinion. Right now everybody is riled up about some homicidal idiots in Iraq. This is off their radar. Hundreds of thousands of people die from some natural cause or another all of the time. It's not a huge spectacle on YouTube.
3) The enemy really isn't Ebola. Ebola is just the opportunistic pathogen that came along. The enemy is really weak governments with little or no public health systems, combined with very poor local sanitation practices.
4) There was a time when air-dropping in a thousand healthworkers with tent hospitals might have stopped this. That time is over. Now it's in the big city, and trying to control or service a population of several hundred thousand is beyond most any country's ability to project intervention.
5) If it doesn't go airborne and stay lethal, which is where the safe money currently is, we'll end up with hundreds of thousands or millions dead and it should burn itself out over the next year or two. That's the optimistic scenario. We have no reason not to believe that's the way it's going to play out.
6) If it goes airborne and stays lethal, we're in for a major shitstorm. But I really don't think second-guessing how we responded will be useful. There are different countries in the world. They have different governments. We do not have one world government, nor do most of us want one. That means that there are always going to be large pockets of humanity where something like this can take off. Structurally humanity is huge. Disease is going to be an issue for us for a long time.