If only we had a way to slow down or stop the spread of disease.
Someday, far onto the future, scientists will figure it out!
Around the world, a post-Covid reality is beginning to sink in: Everyone, everywhere, really is sick a lot more often.
At least 13 communicable diseases, from the common cold to measles and tuberculosis, are surging past their pre-pandemic levels in many regions, and often by significant margins, according to analysis by Bloomberg News and London-based disease forecasting firm Airfinity Ltd.
The resulting research, based on data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies, shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline.
The post-Covid global surge of illnesses — viral and bacterial, common and historically rare — is a mystery that researchers and scientists are still trying to definitively explain. The way Covid lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.
We can explain it, covid takes a toll on our immune system, and we are constantly exposed to it and can catch it multiple times a year. No one in public office wants to acknowledge it because that would mean putting money and effort into infection control.
This is the entirely predictable result of a system which inspires no confidence facing a crisis that destroys any lingering confidence. Imagine confidence in the system like a bag of beans and every new good thing the system does you put a new bean in the bag. Every bad thing that happens you take out a bean. Well, thanks to austerity and neoliberalism no new beans have been added to the bag. We (our oligarchs and their consent manufacturers) have decided that we have enough beans. We have achieved The End of Beanstory. But real life doesn't work like that. Crises continue to appear. Beans are getting removed. Eventually we will be left with a terminal realization crisis: is it still a bag of beans if it has no beans inside it?