Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these networks etc. Within countries schools are the main hubs. Internationally rich nations are the main hubs. /1
The US and UK were the dominant early hubs for Covid. Here in Oz and also now NZ, we were latecomers to this game of do nothing against a pandemic, but we caught up fast. A great Anglo 'fuck you' to the rest of the world. /2
We had form. We've used the word 'endemic' to mean disease that won't go away, almost universally applied to poorer countries, where we happily left diseases to fester while eliminating their spread at home. Now in economy politics, we use it at home too. /3
The same argument for reducing spread in schools - to target the hubs to collapse the networks of infection - should have applied internationally too. And often did, pre-Covid. But today's political libertarians in the UK and US weren't having it. /4
And therefore we ended up with a pandemic, because the Anglo hubs kept pumping fresh infections around the globe, with their hypermobility. Planes were the new mosquitoes. As Oz and NZ showed early, none of that was inevitable. We hit Covid for six, in quick time. /5
Specious arguments were made about not being able to 'lock down forever'. We never needed to lock down forever. We did it as an emergency measure, until we knew more about Covid. One of the early things we learned about it was that it was weak. /6
That very few people transmitted it, and if you could identify the 'superspreading' locations, you could shut it down. Fast. Those turned out to be schools. Ludicrously, the very places we did the LEAST Covid work on. /7
The whole Covid narrative is infected by the hysterical claims of the political libertarians. That we need some total, all-of-society disruption to bring it under control. Even the best-intentioned fall for it, hoping to get the whole country masking, ventilating, vaccinating. /8
The job needed is quite small, precisely targeted, fast and relatively inexpensive. Shut down the hubs. Ventilate schools. Exponential maths will do the rest. /end
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Societies are not just collections of millions of people. Those millions are grouped into networks, organised around hubs. Understanding this is the key to bringing about change, as I’ve Tweeted about with ventilation. Another example shows the same mechanism. /1
Fixing Covid is not a task of convincing and acting on billions of individuals. It’s a MUCH smaller problem of just targeting the hubs, where the infection begins. Schools. The car industry is an example of the same mechanism. Pretend cars are viruses. /2
You see millions of cars out on the roads, and if you were interested in the ‘spread’ of cars, you might think you need to follow and control all of these millions of cars. But they all come from a handful of hubs. Car factories. Every single one of those cars is networked. /3
Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged care and public transport. And yes, everywhere should have good ventilation. But the underlying point I was trying to make here was about the network dynamics of Covid. /1
It’s the reverse point to another I made a while back, that stopping yourself becoming infected is not just an individual act. By interrupting chains of transmission, you’re potentially preventing thousands of other infections. Your individual action *is* collective action. /2
The networked nature of infectious disease collapses our frameworks of thinking around local and global, individual and collective. The thread is saying, don’t portray the solution to Covid as fixing everything, everywhere. That’s unnecessary and why action doesn’t happen. /3
We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1 bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
We knew this earlier in the pandemic, it was the basis of much public health action, to target locations where superspreading would be more likely i.e. mostly crowds, in indoor spaces. Except in schools, which politically were forced open without mitigations. /2
The flip side of this is that we knew Covid was in fact much easier to eliminate from widespread community exposure than we at first feared. Australia’s ‘lockdowns’ for example hit Covid for six, even when they weren’t very long. But we didn’t use that insight. /3
Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal is always right there, in the detail. /1
I do a lot of work with road engineers. Roads are either not fixed, or only patched by quick pothole backfills, because there’s no money to do anything else. It’s a matter of extreme frustration for them, because they know how to make roads that don’t have these problems. /2
Interestingly where I live highway repairs in recent years have taken a very different approach. Whole sections of damaged road have been ripped out, and replaced with top-quality resurfacing, using really thick layers of hot mix, normally reserved only for critical roads. /3
Coming back to this, the genius of Asia was to take the factories we sponsored there, to free ourselves of doing any thinking or work, and use them to restore Asia at the centre of the world. Where it had been for much of human history. /1
Even more gloriously (they laugh at us), Asia also now contains the dominant numbers of working-age adults. The people we’ve been importing as slave labour under the cover of ‘labour hire’ schemes. That flow will dry up as Asia continues its ascendancy. /2
While we in the West have desperately old populations, wallowing in old fantasies of empire, accumulating ‘the sights’ in perpetual tourism we can’t actually afford, still stuck in our old imperial ways of accumulation. That’s all our travel obsession is. /3
The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate change, mass slaughter in Gaza etc. A thread about the disappearance of ‘taking care of business’. /1
Because that’s the loss I think people are feeling. The sense that somebody, somewhere, is taking care of shit that happens. Now it all just seems to happen, and nothing is done. And ‘personal responsibility’ seems an obviously ludicrous response. /2
What can an individual do when faced with these massive problems? For starters I think it helps to see that only the most privileged people in the world tend to frame things this way. Us here in the West, mostly. /3