Если от коронавируса и изобретут вакцину, его все равно не удастся взять под полный контроль до 2025 года.
Об этом сообщила "Апострофу" американская журналистка, автор научно-публицистических статей и книг, лауреат Пулитцеровской премии Лори Гарретт.
Recommended Reading: I thought Fareed Zakaria was spot on in his Washington Post column about Donald Trump’s re-election strategy and the conundrum within it. This reminded me of one of the most instructive books for our time, The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert Paxton, which makes the point that strongmen inevitably burn themselves out once they are elected, because their strength is in fighting government, not being a part of it. Also from the seer of this crisis, Laurie Garrett, a damning piece about the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid emergency.
On January 22, Macau’s first Covid-19 case was confirmed: a 52-year-old woman from Wuhan who had taken the high-speed rail to Zhuhai and crossed into the Chinese special administrative region a few days before.
Macau’s chief executive, Ho Iat-seng, who had been sworn in only a month earlier as the city commemorated the 20-year anniversary of its handover from Portugal, announced the creation of the Novel Coronavirus Response and Coordination Centre, which replaced the Interdepartmental Working Group Against Pneumonia of Unknown Cause he had set up just two weeks earlier, on January 5.
"We now know that Xi Jinping went before the state council, the high governing body of China, and told them in a secret session on January 7 that the issue in Wuhan was so serious that he was personally stepping in and taking control," said Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and author of "The Coming Plague." "The head of state of a nation of more than a billion people doesn't personally intervene in a little outbreak with a half-a-dozen cases. Uh-unh. We now know that the CIA was passing on to the White House, 'Look, there's something potentially catastrophic emerging.'
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”
Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and pandemic expert, said of asylum seekers, “There is no particular reason to single them out. And there is no particular reason to believe that closing the border has any effect whatsoever on the spread of disease. The disease is already here.”
We knew this was coming. In her 1994 warning to the world, The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett concluded: “While the human race battles itself, fighting over ever more crowded turf and scarcer resources, the advantage moves to the microbes’ court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities.”
安静、空旷，劳丽·加勒特望向窗外，世界第一大城市纽约已经完全没有了昔日的繁华景象，她自己也大幅减少了在外活动的时间，Zoom、Skype等视频电话软件成为新的工作手段。恐慌情绪让商店的货物被抢购一空，但食品供应还算充足。
这位至少写过三本有关传染病著作的纽约客，曾因为在公卫领域的报道而获得普利策奖，此时看起来并不难适应疫情笼罩下的生活。在研究和观察了人类社会的多次传染病流行造成的灾难后，对于新冠疫情给世界带来的变化，她认为，只有9·11恐袭事件可以与之相提并论。
The epidemic begins in a teeming country in Asia, but despite the efforts of the government to contain it, it soon spreads throughout the world. Some victims experience an uncontrolled immune response called a cytokine storm, causing them to drown in their own fluids. In America, schools close as citizens shelter at home. Grocery store shelves empty, and the United States is plunged into the worst depression since the 1930s.
How can we make sense of the scary reality we are all now living in? Where do pandemics come from? And why are they occurring more frequently? On this special episode, Bloomberg’s Jason Gale talks to some of the world’s most experienced pandemic experts to get their insights.
The islands of Qinghai Lake, more than 10,000 feet above sea level in north-western China, are well known to people who study pandemics. Each year they provide a resting point for hundreds of thousands of birds as they migrate along the Central Asian and East Asian flyways. Diseases brought here by birds can travel across these great migration routes, which join other flyways to span the globe.
Laurie Garrett had been at the Council on Foreign Relations for less than a year when, in 2005, she was told that a “mutational event” had occurred on Qinghai Lake. A type of avian influenza was infecting bar-headed geese, a species that migrates thousands of kilometres, crossing the Himalayas from the Tibetan plateau to reach as far as southern India.
Nothing spreads like fear.
Nine years after the release of Contagion, a Steven Soderbergh–directed epidemiology thriller bearing that tagline, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China’s Wuhan province—declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO), which has since renamed the disease it causes COVID-19—has sent shock waves through the world’s economy and incited panic far from the disease’s apparent point of origin.