Just a small point, I think MERS was Middle East Respiratory Syndrome - one that did not emerge from China, for once.
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I do believe it. Despite the WHO and lip service paid by SOME governments to listening to it, many are sitting on their hands. In the US and UK they are trying to pretend Covid has gone. In the UK the govt (I think it is technically still a government but it’s hard to tell at present) is doing sod all to put us on a better footing for the next pandemic.
If we do have one it is almost certainly woefully underfunded and the govt is not paying attention to the things it would be recommending (just as it did not last time, which is why we were so unprepared to deal with Covid).
Sarky rhetorical response: citation please. I doubt the UK experts would agree with that.
… and embarrassing news, like “we’ve got a major health problem here” - China’s first response was to hush it up, STAT! But in an authoritarian regime, any bad news is tantamount to dissent.
… but one that is subject to the CCP deciding whether what it is finding when disease is found is something it can admit to the world or not. It tends not to want to issue bad news so will wait until it can put a positive spin (however misleading) on it.
CCP member 1 - bugger, we’ve got this new health thing and it’s spreading like wildfire.
CCP member 2 - well don’t let anyone know - maybe we can figure out how to kill it before anyone notices.
(some time later)
CCP member 1 - we don’t seem to be able to control it, we don’t know how to deal with it, it’s escaped to the rest of the world, what now?
CCP member 2 - ok - admit we’ve got it, and say we think an American brought it here.
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I included the authoritarian part not because of the myth of their efficiency- but with regard to China’s massive data collection and tracking of all its people. It’s on a scale that nobody else is even attempting. Terrible for democracy, probably helpful for tracking diseases.
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In the US, not so much. I don’t think we’ve even recovered the pandemic preparation structures that Trump got rid of when he came into office. So we’re literally in worse shape, in terms of responding to future pandemics, than we were before COVID.
In the US, vaccine-deniers are being voted into office…
Nor do the politicians, apparently. It seems to have become politically poisonous to suggest that anything still needs to be done about COVID, and no one is talking about the thousands of people still dying.every day, much less what kid of structures we’re going to need to deal with long-term COVID disabilities…
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