Thread by @drclairetaylor

Are we actually seeing mass amnesia of what happened in the last 3 years? Even people forgetting Covid infections? What’s going on?
IT’S HAPPENED BEFORE
Spanish flu.
How did we not predict this?
#PandemicAmnesia

Relevance: will leave us totally unprepared for the next pandemic.
There will always be a next pandemic.

beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/…

My generation has been incredibly lucky
Huge reduction in child mortality rates
First pandemic in my 40s
Clean, running water
Housing

info on pandemic amnesia:

‘Live with the virus’ asks citizens to look only to their own futures, which are political strategies that might work for privileged individuals who have the capacity to protect their health, but less well for those with limited personal resources’

mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/8…

‘Between February 1918 and April 1920, the Spanish flu is thought to have killed 20-50 million people worldwide: more than all the soldiers and civilians killed in the First World War combined. ‘

‘There is no public memorial to the people who died of Spanish flu in the UK. ‘(228,000)

newstatesman.com/world/uk/2021/…

‘Historians have many explanations for this national amnesia. The war created a certain fatalism, perhaps numbness, towards mass death even among the younger generation (who disproportionately suffered both in battle and from Spanish flu) –as well as collective desire to move on.

‘Pandemic living can make it much more difficult to form a memory at all, let alone call it back when we need it, said Yassa, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.’

edition.cnn.com/2022/02/03/hea…

The World Health Organization's top emergency expert said that the world risked future pandemics if it suffered "amnesia" and did not learn from the current coronavirus crisis.

saltwire.com/nova-scotia/ne…

I have seen the amnesia that seems to descend upon the world after a traumatic event, and that's understandable," Mike Ryan told a briefing in Geneva.

But if we do this again like we did after SARS, like we did after H5N1, after H1N1 pandemic, if we continue to ignore the realities of what emerging&dangerous pathogens can do to our civilization, then we are likely to experience the same or worse again within our lifetimes,"

Add in what Covid can do to the brain 🤯🧠

https://twitter.com/gringogranadino/status/1629861446241615872

So, no, you are not imagining the mass forgetting, when it’s not even over.
Not everyone experiences this mass amnesia -and it seems a bizarre world to be in.

‘’’The final act of a pandemic is global amnesia”

newstatesman.com/international-…

Although with more genetic mutations than atoms in the universe, Covid could still surprise us.

Fascinating stuff. #PandemicAmnesia #PandemicAmnesia2023
#MassForgetting

Feel free to add your own experiences!