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Comment by protoman3000 | Hacker News Reader

If there COVID-19 pandemic has shown us anything then that civilized humanity is unable to prevent catastrophe, but that it also will be able to mitigate the worst effects for the richest 20-30% of the population.

It is sobering, because there was always this observation that a common enemy unites people to strike effective action and we could feed our hopes that if things are just serious enough, we will be strong enough. But, the pandemic was that common enemy and yet we saw a failure to prevent it.

We shouldn’t even say it was due to egoism, greed or incompetence. It’s just impossible to coordinate on that scale.

Why would it be any different here?

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Apparently unpopular opinion- there was/is no coordinated super-effective thing that a united humanity could have done to stop the spread of Covid once it emerged. There's no One Weird Old Trick that prevents a new, deadly disease from spreading in a really interconnected modern world, unless you believe in utterly unrealistic policies like 'everyone on planet Earth coordinates to stay in their house for months to stop the spread'. Countries like Australia that were pretty authoritarian in preventing spread are now getting hit by more waves later on. Certainly there were tons of policy failures along the way, but the disease's spread was pretty unstoppable

Dealing with an asteroid threat doesn't require hundreds of millions of people to get off their asses and actually do something about it. That's the difference.

It may require politicians to unite, to provide funding. Like global warming.

The only difference is that we would be calling astrophysicists "heroes" instead of healthcare workers.

Hell, we might even clap for them at baseball games.

And meanwhile we would give them pay reductions because honor is worth far more than fake money

The difference would be that there would be a clear outcome - many quick deaths, and a relatively simple solution - change it's trajectory or blow it up.

Afaik, everyone did follow lockdown orders in the first few months.

Then it became clear that the death rate isn't worth worrying about - yes, for the majority, 1-3% is clearly not enough. If it was 10%, if corpses were littering the streets, I bet the attitude would be completely different.

Then the conflicting messages started. Do this, do that, but not for these guys, they're essential or something. And not the rich, they can still travel. And you are vaccinated but still can get infected.

The governments didn't even try that hard, no one got forced, even now no one's forcing vaccination.

So the majority just stopped giving a fuck.

> The governments didn't even try that hard

Exactly. My impression was that there were no contingency emergency plans, every action was always only reactive and never preventive.

I still can’t understand how it is not possible to immediately impose lockdown measures after clear signs of rising infection numbers in order to quickly and swiftly prevent further escalation. Instead, at every wave again and again we had the same discussions and officials were starting to develop new emergency plans 4 weeks into exponential infection rates.

These are our elected officials and they are incompetent. It is our responsibility, our fault.

Has there ever been faster global vaccine deployment(s)? Did we have ANY coronavirus vaccines 2 years ago? Frankly an asteroid collision can either be mitigated at the nation state level or not (positive cooperation of course helps).

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