Lessons From History For Us Regarding The Coronavirus.

Started by mongers, April 10, 2020, 12:22:19 PM

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mongers

What lessons, if any can be drawn from history to inform how we deal with the Cornavirus pandemic and it's aftermath?


I don't feel qualified to contribute to the thread, but I will say the grim footage out of New York of the temporary mass burial for unclaimed victims, reminded me of the plague pits now under a car-park 300 yards from here.

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again"

The Brain

Self-flagellation doesn't work. Not for me anyway.
Women want me. Men want to be with me.

MadImmortalMan

What lessons can be drawn or which ones will be?

I think we'll "learn" all the wrong things, sadly.
"Stability is destabilizing." --Hyman Minsky

"Complacency can be a self-denying prophecy."
"We have nothing to fear but lack of fear itself." --Larry Summers

Josquius

Already mentioned it a lot, but the winter of 46/47. Same kind of sudden economic shutdown albeit for other reasons.
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PDH

We will learn that we must forget any lessons about the past, and instead continue to devalue human life over profit.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
-Umberto Eco

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"I'm pretty sure my level of depression has nothing to do with how much of a fucking asshole you are."

-CdM

grumbler

Yet now you fill the skies where we watched a million sunsets with flame and contrails, paying no heed to the hard lessons the universe has tried to teach you. Are you a breath of life to invigorate a complacent world, covid-19, or an insidious cancer which must be excised?
The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.   -G'Kar

Bayraktar!

MadImmortalMan

It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people.

"Stability is destabilizing." --Hyman Minsky

"Complacency can be a self-denying prophecy."
"We have nothing to fear but lack of fear itself." --Larry Summers

mongers

Quote from: PDH on April 10, 2020, 03:13:16 PM
We will learn that we must forget any lessons about the past, and instead continue to devalue human life over profit.

It's the only way too profit.  :)
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again"

Monoriu

The 2003 SARS lessons aren't very useful for the Coronavirus because the characteristics are different.  Coronavirus is much more contagious for example. 

mongers

Quote from: Monoriu on April 10, 2020, 05:27:45 PM
The 2003 SARS lessons aren't very useful for the Coronavirus because the characteristics are different. Coronavirus is much more contagious for example.

Well in the very short term, that's one lesson much of W.Europe hasn't learnt from E.Asia.
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again"

Monoriu

Quote from: mongers on April 10, 2020, 05:38:56 PM
Quote from: Monoriu on April 10, 2020, 05:27:45 PM
The 2003 SARS lessons aren't very useful for the Coronavirus because the characteristics are different. Coronavirus is much more contagious for example.

Well in the very short term, that's one lesson much of W.Europe hasn't learnt from E.Asia.

That sounds wrong on so many levels  :lol:  The general assumption is that Western Europe is superior to East Asia.  We want to learn from you, not the other way round  ;)

Eddie Teach

Quote from: Monoriu on April 10, 2020, 05:57:38 PM
Quote from: mongers on April 10, 2020, 05:38:56 PM
Quote from: Monoriu on April 10, 2020, 05:27:45 PM
The 2003 SARS lessons aren't very useful for the Coronavirus because the characteristics are different. Coronavirus is much more contagious for example.

Well in the very short term, that's one lesson much of W.Europe hasn't learnt from E.Asia.

That sounds wrong on so many levels  :lol:  The general assumption is that Western Europe is superior to East Asia.  We want to learn from you, not the other way round  ;)

Yeah, I don't buy it. You're the Middle Kingdom and we are mere gwai-lo.
To sleep, perchance to dream. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

MadImmortalMan

Quote from: Monoriu on April 10, 2020, 05:57:38 PM

That sounds wrong on so many levels  :lol:  The general assumption is that Western Europe is superior to East Asia.  We want to learn from you, not the other way round  ;)

The current fad is to fetishize authoritarianism in the face of crisis. It does make sense in that context.
"Stability is destabilizing." --Hyman Minsky

"Complacency can be a self-denying prophecy."
"We have nothing to fear but lack of fear itself." --Larry Summers

Syt

We'll probably learn about as much as from the 2008 crash. Boy, did that teach everyone a lesson! :)
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
—Stephen Jay Gould

Proud owner of 42 Zoupa Points.

Admiral Yi

Quote from: Syt on April 11, 2020, 12:23:57 AM
We'll probably learn about as much as from the 2008 crash. Boy, did that teach everyone a lesson! :)

Couldn't agree more!  Not a single sub-prime crash since then! :yes: