Crisis talks: Why combating future pandemics needs a collective mind shift today

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Is COVID-19 the worst catastrophe of our lifetime? Don’t bet on it, says Italian physicist and author Paolo Giordano, who warns that without social and political change, other diseases are likely to put coronavirus in the shade | GoodWeekendMag

– one of the first about the pandemic – as Italy was becoming the disease epicentre in Europe. How are things in Rome now restrictions are lifting?

A lot about COVID is to do with assembling data and interpreting numbers correctly. But maths is more the science of relations than numbers; it’s why behaviour that doesn’t surprise scientists can shock everyone else. This is why a sudden, exponential increase in the number of COVID-19 cases is reported as an “explosion” and “dramatic” in the media, when nature – and in this case, infectious disease – doesn’t behave in a linear fashion.

I hope our societies will get in touch with science again, but we’ve been moving in the opposite direction because of the spread of conspiracy theories on social media. Nationalism and populism are effective at manipulating fear and rage but are weak and helpless at dealing with huge crises like COVID, as we’ve seen in some countries.

Medical personnel in Brescia, northern Italy, care for patients in an emergency temporary room set up to ease pressure on the country's healthcare system.You write that the virus is democratic in the way it infects people, but those who have suffered the most are the poor in countries like Brazil and India and the disenfranchised in the US. George Floyd, a black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer, was COVID-19 positive.

The number of pathogens that jump from animals to humans in the past 50 years has grown, beginning with AIDS in the early 1980s, the principal driver of which The accelerated extinction of multiple animal species is forcing several bacteria that lived inside their guts for millennia to move elsewhere for survival. Reckless deforestation is releasing micro-organisms we haven’t even identified or named yet.

 

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GregCallaghan1 GoodWeekendMag He lost me when he called it an epidemic

GoodWeekendMag We need a serious reduction in world population. Sad that it will be fatal infectious diseases doing the job and not birth control mechanisms.

GoodWeekendMag The days of the CCP is coming. China will one day be a free democratic nation. China right now with the CCP is the most dangerous in humanity.

GoodWeekendMag What an utter load of horseshit 😂

GoodWeekendMag Yes, well thanks for that uplifting statement, I feel so much better now. Bye the way, who are you exactly

GoodWeekendMag Is it a bad thing to say, I'm glad I am as old as I am, because I will hopefully miss most of what is coming, but omg I fear for my kids and g'kids 😔

GoodWeekendMag Frankly, I think the epidemic of hatred sweeping the world is far more threatening to the human race than COVID-19.

GoodWeekendMag LMFTFY: 'Other diseases are likely to put coronavirus in the shade' There won't be any social or political change as everyone is a 'citizen expert'!

GoodWeekendMag Oh jeez I want to put Paulo in the shade after this one. I’ll take the under on another pandemic in my lifetime.

GoodWeekendMag Imagine an epidemic that caused permanent brain damage in 1 in every 36 kids. Would you consider that to be worse than COVID-19? Because we are currently in the middle of an autism epidemic that according to the CDC is now affecting 1 in 36 kids and no one is talking about it.😕

GoodWeekendMag Stick to physics dude.

GoodWeekendMag We’re doomed.

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