Thread by @EmilBergholtz

🧵 Since I notice an increasing number of otherwise very reasonable people saying “we have to learn to live with the virus” I’d like to briefly spell out why I find it a fundamentally flawed idea. It is no coincidence that the skilled AIER/Koch/GBD PR people use this phrasing.

The same crowd has in the past been successful arguing that we have to learn to "live with climate change" [1] and “flattening the curve” [2].

Each of these statements have the same components. It sounds reasonable and realistic at first. It obfuscates that there is an alternative. Most importantly, it does not take into account non-linear feedback loops. Instead it is based on a linear and short timescale logic.

Thus they do not hold up against detailed scrutiny. And the devil is in the detail.

[1] It is perhaps no surprise that economists often embrace such ideas: Nordhaus got the 2018 Nobel prize in Economics for his calculations, suggesting an increase of Earths temperature by 3.5 C until 2100 as optimal.

Based on this he has worked against climate action which he finds too costly. Fortunately, there are Climate scientists with a broad spectrum of backgrounds that understand non-linear dynamical systems, and thus that Nordhaus’ early estimate is pure insanity.

There are non-linear and long term effects missed by Nordhaus and others. Tipping points including melted glaciers, changed ocean currents, deforestation etc., all beyond which it is qualitatively harder, ultimately impossible to bring back Earth into a state is used to be in.

It is now consensus that 3.5 C is a far too high increase, possibly threatening our entire existence.

[2] Flattening the curve is very similar. Some thought it would be too expensive to try to do anything substantial, and most in the western world were falsely led to believe that there was no option, that almost everyone would get the disease no matter what.

This despite many eastern countries demonstrating that suppression worked wonderfully. We now know the catastrophic outcome of "flattening the curve" — which was initially obfuscated by the assumptions going into the narrative.

There are now new and much more potent mutations, akin to tipping points, and the idea of rapid herd immunity did not work out. All this was allowed to happen because the initial problem was ill-posed.

[3] With “we have to learn to live with the virus” we are again in the same situation. If we do not pursue suppression there will inevitably be new mutations. We have learned the hard way that the assumption that such would become milder was wrong.

Will we never learn?