Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference?
It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
One other thing to note - our ability to lockdown and maintain a functional society was contingent on the ability for enough (privileged) people to work from home that the internet has now afforded us. A few decades ago our world looked and worked very differently, and the pandemic response would have differed accordingly; if lockdowns might have actually had a direct material impact on the intelligentsia, managerial class, liberal elite, etc. or cost them their homes or their jobs, there would have been far less of a push for lockdowns.
Naturally, the working class still got screwed - either you're "non-essential" and lost your job or were "essential" and ran a risk of contracting COVID that your overlords got to avoid from the comfort of their own home - but it might've helped slow the spread of the virus, some.
The claim seems to be that it's because we're "able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days [...] or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later". The latter certainly wasn't needed for SARS1, but the former...? At the time I was a high school student in Toronto, which was hit relatively hard by SARS1, and I remember there was lots of fear and anxiety around it, but it didn't affect my daily life in any way. Did we do lots of PCR testing and quarantining to keep it from spreading? Not sure. That wouldn't have been possible a few decades ago, anyway.
It is nonsensical but not because of the way the viruses evolved - if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event! With SARS1 we actually managed to make a vaccine - we just didn't end up needing it.
> if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event!
That depends quite a bit on how rapidly it spreads. If COVID had started with Omicron's level of infectiousness, it'd have been a dramatically more deadly pandemic.
Agreed, but then the response to its infectiousness would have been different as well! And even Omicron wouldn't rise to anything close to an extinction event, it is like the opposite of MERS, way better at transmission, relatively bad at killing.
If the first wave of SARS-Cov-2 was Omicron we'd have seen a worse 1st wave on net, but a far higher survival rate, more population immunity pre-vaccine.. and part of me thinks that the response would have been better, the original SARS-Cov-2 hit a bit of a sweet-spot in terms of political accountability with respect to how slowly it moved across the world and the gradual build up of hospital crisis in most places (1st wave hot-spots excepted of course).
> nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later
“…be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later.”
