Is there in any way a brighter side to this?Something I talk about a fair amount: It's incredibly hard to measure what didn't happen but should have. Humans are really bad at that, and understandably so.
If we had adopted a lot of the practices being advocated currently and avoided the epidemic, no one would know or believe we had accomplished anything. Having a pandemic and defeating it is the only way humanity can know and understand with confidence that we need to make a lot of changes to make life work with so many billions of people on the planet.
I have a serious medical condition. I've gotten off all drugs. I know what my life is supposed to look like because I know what my condition is supposed to do. Other people have what I have. I know the typical prognosis.
Yet I have no credibility. I've been mocked and attacked and dismissed online for years because other people cannot see that I've done anything and don't believe I have. Other people can't see what I see and it makes me look to them like a loon suffering hallucinations, not a visionary that people ought to listen to.
I once had someone email me and tell me "I give my child the sea salt and coconut oil you've recommended, and he's in the ER less, but he's not on fewer drugs."
She meant he still was on the same amount of maintenance drugs as before. She wasn't really recognizing that fewer ER visits meant fewer rounds of antibiotics, steroids and similar.
The child was taking less medication, but the mother couldn't quite manage to count the drugs that weren't happening. In her mind, it would only count if her child could reduce his maintenance drugs.
There are a lot of things I hope we change. But the reality is that without a pandemic, no one would believe those changes actually provide germ control and actually matter to the functioning of the world. People would just find the restrictions annoying and pointless and would rebel against it.
You are only going to get compliance when enough people have been burned that change seems less onerous than not changing. That's basically how humans always handle things.
It's frustrating. I wish it weren't so.
But people don't change everything at great cost to avoid disaster based on predictions and models. We make those changes because we got burned in actual fact, not in theory, and we don't want to go back.
And then it's no longer hypothetical. Then it's actually real and we aren't running from Boogeymen. We're problem solving and dealing with actual reality.
Then you see real change.