I pride myself for knowing a great deal about a great deal of things. If I ran for president you wouldn’t catch me unaware about major global catastrophes like the Syrian Civil War or the President of a major country. But I have to say, I had NFI that a pandemic could come along
force everyone, all across the world into hiding, potentially for months. I knew occasionally new viruses emerged & it was a big deal when 1 did but I thought SARs or H1N1 was like peak problem aside from Hollywood where pandemics that wiped out 90% of the population raged. But
apparently all this time, all this 100 year time, THIS could happen. This covid19 level pandemic could happen- something that even with all our modern advancements would require us to resort to the oldest of techniques to deal with-hiding from each other. And I’m flabbergasted
not only to find out that modern humans have such pathetic vulnerability to a respiratory disease whose main advantage over us ultimately is simple novelty- we haven’t had time to develop a vaccine against it- but also that somehow most of us had no freaking idea about this
vulnerability- I mean I certainly didn’t. I had no damn idea that a new respiratory virus could emerge that could force the entire world to have to stop and go into hiding and if 3 months ago you had proposed such an outlandish scenario to me, I’d have thought you nuts. It would
have sounded as crazy as the US electing Donald Trump as president. Well anyway... That said, come to find out, not many, but some people did know this was possible, even likely, and given how easily this virus has turned the world upside down I find it shocking that we were so
grossly underprepared for this thing. And I don’t mean the specific Trump, unprepared, slow to react stuff- I mean how in the hell could we not have prepared for something like this decades ago via stockpiles of med supplies like vents & masks, like w the strategic oil supply?
