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Comment by mirekrusin | Hacker News Reader

This is, indeed, scary. Now we have global baseline. During pre-covid times self-isolating/self-sufficient communities were crazy-labelled - maybe that's going to change now. Maybe the world, as we know it (during our livetimes), will actually change in very noticable ways.

Pulling off global social distancing is the only short term, generic tool it seems, ie. next virus may not require ventilators to help at all so securing that is not a solution.

Long incubation period is really scary as it renders social distancing useless (too late to be effective); the only survivors are natural survivors (immune system finding it's way to create antibodies) and isolated communities. Or Mars collonies, maybe.

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Another thing it’s got me thinking a lot about is how much of the economy’s straight up useless (results of messed up incentives leading to escalating red queen races, as in advertising, or simple organizational waste) or chasing the last few percent of life-satisfaction or convenience. Between the two it seems to be, IDK, like half, conservatively. Which is kind of alarming.

[edit] alarming that so much of our economy is spending that must be done to keep things working (to keep money circulating) but which provides between negative and marginal improvements in the world or our lives, I mean.

I don't think they are useless. We cannot stop breathing for 10 minutes, but we can not eat or drink for days, but no one would say that eating is useless.

The same is happening with our society. We are sick so we suspended the equivalent of eating, while we keep the equivalent of breathing going on.

> next virus may not require ventilators to help at all so securing that is not a solution.

I would be interested to know if I'm missing something, but I believe that respiratory viruses are the only ones that have a large chance of becoming pandemics - sneezing, coughing, breathing, speaking are the only gestures that can spread with no real way of fully protecting yourself from it (save for wearing gas masks). Now, I suppose in principle you could have a virus that causes respiratory symptoms, but that affects some other organ more than the lungs, but I'm not sure how plausible that is biologically.

So, I think it is by far most likely that the next pandemic will also require ventilators and face masks. Stocking up on both everyhwere in the world would be a good idea.

Also, it should become required practice for all countries (and even most large companies) to have significant pandemic reserves. We know for sure that a new pandemic will arise in the future, and there is a good chance that it will happen again in the next 50 years let's say.

> Now, I suppose in principle you could have a virus that causes respiratory symptoms, but that affects some other organ more than the lungs, but I'm not sure how plausible that is biologically

Chicken pox? It's spread through the respiratory system, but primarily affects the skin and nervous system. And it's enormously contagious: we wouldn't have a chance to contain it in a population that started with zero immunity.

Zika, HIV are not about sneezing.

Right, insect-based infection is one vector I forgot.

HIV is kind of special,in that it took years before it was recognized as the cause of AIDS, and, since it was mainly affecting stigmatized groups, government efforts to contain it were non-existent for years. I'm not sure that another sexually-transmitted infection would follow the same epidemiology in the current age, at least in the more tolerant countries.

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