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#pandemics

2 posts2 participants0 posts today

New paper just published.

When a pandemic occurs, a hard lockdown is an obvious and effective way to stop it. However, lockdowns come with serious societal issues. For example, during COVID-19, a critical mass of people opposing lockdowns coalesced in Britain. This was mainly due to two demographic groups, namely self-employed people, who were concerned about their own economic losses, and parents, who dreaded the prospect of having to be closed in the same home with their own kids. Seeking validation and trying to promote their own personal interests, these people became main spreaders of disinformation, eventually falling prey of state-sponsored populistic and anti-science propaganda machines.

In this study, we show that one can use optimization and control theory to introduce only light travel restrictions between macroareas, such as states or regions within a country, yielding better final results in terms of infections and economic damage than those that were actually obtained at the time.

sciencedirect.com/science/arti

Continued thread

William Hirst says that a #narrative that leaves out information “induces forgetting of the unmentioned material.”

#Talking about other parts of the story actively leads people to forget what is not discussed. “We seem to have a brain that is designed to build a collective memory around collective remembering and collective forgetting,” he explains. “Why? It’s adaptive. We’re social creatures oriented toward our in-group and away from out-groups. Memory is designed to reinforce our in-group membership.”

motherjones.com/politics/2024/ @psychology @socialpsych @histodons

Mother JonesMillions have amnesia about the worst of Trump's presidency. Memory experts explain why.How Trump is benefiting from the limits of our memory.
Replied in thread

@parismarx

And in 1million years time or a billion years time when there are strange terminal #diseases worst than #cancer which is presently killing millions of #children & young #people today, not just the elderly, strange lung #infections and incurable/undiagnosable #epidemics & #pandemics etcetera, the same #demons #future #generations will turn to blaming #God, very funny.
They blame God for everything, but they are their own problem.
Horribly shallow #minds ❗

Plus, #ClimateCrisis, #pandemics, #ecosystem #collapse #FoodShortages & so on, are much harder to respond to when we pre-occupied by idiots trying to make things worse.
"How Trump’s “Mass Deportation” Plan Would Ruin America
It would be brutal, costly, & likely illegal.
Undocumented Immigrants Pay Billions of Dollars in Taxes. [it turns out]
Deporting 7 million workers would “reduce national employment by an amount similar to that experienced during the Great Recession.” GDP would immediately contract by 1.4 percent, & , eventually, by 2.6 percent. In 20 years, the US economy would shrink nearly 6 percent—or $1.6 trillion. Trump’s plan would lead to a dire shortage of low-wage workers, which would “bring on a recession while reigniting inflation.
a 50 percent decrease in the farm labor supply could result in a 21% increase in the prices of hand-picked crops. “If [immigrant workers] just disappeared overnight, I do not think that we in this country could grow enough food.”"
motherjones.com/politics/2024/

The more I read of #Covid revisionists, the more I want to tell about this book--a detailed look at the history of crappy approach to #pandemics.

" The disproportionate harm experienced by marginalized individuals is not the product of their own decisions; instead, the collective choices of society and the tangled web of interactions across people and communities leave these groups most exposed to the perils of epidemics."

#medical #inequality
press.jhu.edu/books/title/1290

My former history teacher wrote a book ‘Pandemics in Singapore: 1819-2022’

Of note is the mention that during the colonial period, locals often did not report infectious diseases to the British colonial authorities as they often quarantined them in horrific situations. Also discusses SARS of early 2000s (I remember taking my temp daily in sch); and of course Covid-19

academia.sg/academic-views/cov

Academia | SG · Understanding COVID-19 through Singapore’s pandemic history - Academia | SGHistorian LOH KAH SENG and physician HSU LI YANG, authors of a new book on Singapore's past pandemics, argue that history, governance and science should work better with one another in the next one.

The link between climate change and a spate of rare disease outbreaks in 2023

"The temperature-sensitive pathogens that caught U.S. communities off guard are a grim preview of the future."

grist.org/health/the-link-betw

Grist · The link between climate change and a spate of rare disease outbreaks in 2023By Zoya Teirstein
Continued thread

2/

"where science is used to deal with plagues, #pandemics, #social and #ecological problems related to our increasing impact on the planet and #health, #inequalities and #HumanRights violations, the post-normal approach may be seen as natural. [...]

On the contrary, perspectives that tend to reduce the #complexity of these choices to easy one-dimensional metrics and present these as the stark facts on which politics must act, are the ones that most tragically—often—lead to wrong choices" [1]