![]() If something similar to Covid, or perhaps even worse, is on its way in only a decade or three, we probably ought to be thinking now about what we would want to do when it arrives.ĭuring Covid, some countries or regions (like Florida) were able to tough it out with only very limited restrictions because their healthcare capacity wasn’t ever at material risk of being overwhelmed. Instead we’d have to find other ways to get by: standing ready to repurpose other resources, say, or perhaps being willing to have short lockdowns to buy time.īut if serious pandemics are actually 10 to 30 year events and it just happens that we had two in a row that were fairly mild, then our attitude to the allocation of resources should perhaps be rather different. If we were only going to need to deal with a serious pandemic once per century it would probably make little sense to aim continuously to provide enough surge capacity – eg critical care beds and ventilators – to cope when the evil day came. If we knew that San Francisco would experience a major earthquake once per century it wouldn’t make any sense to provide enough fire engines, continuously, to cover every blaze that might occur in that extreme case.Ī similar principle applies to healthcare. An event that is going to occur only once a century is not likely to be able to justify providing capacity to deal with it properly when it comes. This difference in picture has potentially very significant policy implications. Had the 1970s Russian Flu and the 2000s Swine Flu been three or four times as bad, mass-killing pandemics would now be seen as rather common events, occurring every one to three decades, instead of the “once in a lifetime” or “once in a century” picture of them we might wish were true. Yet with the hindsight that Covid gives us, that looks much more like brute luck. Whereas there were major pandemics in 1889-90, 1918-1920, 1957-69, the two most acute pandemics of my first five decades – the Russian Flu of 1977-79 and the Swine Flu of 2009 – were much tamer affairs each killing much less than 1 million people worldwide. Read him on our breaking news site,, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.I was born in 1970, and grew up in an era that, though few recognised it at the time, was very unusual and fortunate in its lack of significant pandemics. Students who already boarded a bus will be taken back to bus stops and directed home.įares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. ![]() The school district advises parents to keep children at home until further notice. Cracker Barrel becomes next target of Texas orgs' anti-LGBTQ+ boycottsĪround 9 a.m., the Fort Sam Houston Independent School District said the post was "placed on lockdown again."įort Sam Houston public affairs officers did not immediately return calls seeking comment about the incident.Spring storms give way to potentially hotter, dryer weather this summer.Texas officials investigate 20 dead mutilated sharks found on beach. ![]() San Antonio and Hill Country faces possible severe storms, large hail.Comedian Matt Rife adds more shows after presale ticket fiasco.H-E-B set to open its 'most breathtaking' store in Central Texas.Thousands of fish wash ashore on Texas beaches due to low oxygen event.
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