Memories of 2020

On Aug 1, 2020, I wrote a Facebook post that went a little bit viral. Remember, this was the 5th or 6th month of the acknowledged COVID pandemic, and still four months away from an authorized vaccine, and almost a year away from widespread vaccination.

I wanted to revisit this post, as it listed 33 thoughts about the pandemic, which I had just expressed as the guest speaker on a popular video podcast called, “Dave’s Digital Cafe.”

I’m curious about whether readers think any of this is relevant today. Back then, it’s clear I was concerned about IP issues constraining vaccine development, and the zoonotic extent of the virus. Neither of those has emerged as something we think about a lot today.

On the other hand, I think my observations about political tribalism, the failure of communication, and the importance of infrastructure investment are even more poignant now than they were at the start of the pandemic.

Hideous AI-generated image based on prompt, “create an image called ‘memories of 2020′”

In any case, let me know in the comments what you think.

Here are the 33 thoughts, reposted verbatim from four years ago:

What Will We Have Learned from this Pandemic? A year or two years from now, when we look back at this pandemic, we should ask ourselves what did we learn as a society? Transparency is the best policy. Epidemiologists complain about how non-transparent the data and the process of decision-making has been. We don’t know what indicators the government uses to make decisions about opening up the economy.
What do we do to control this epidemic? Low-tech, nineteenth century techniques – staying at home and wearing masks – have been proven to be the most effective for rapid control of an epidemic. The anti-mask demonstrations are denying centuries-old experiences. Twenty-first century technologies have advantages, among them new technologies to develop vaccines. The internet has facilitated conversations at safe, comfortable distances, which would not have been possible during SARS. The rate of exchange of information between scientists, experts and the public is unparalleled.
Animal husbandry might be innately incompatible with long-term human health. Almost every great pandemic of a respiratory nature originates as zoonosis – a disease which moves from animals to humans. This disease probably came from a pangolin and a bat. Our close association with animals is causing us to experience these endless pandemics. These pandemics are a threat to our global economy and our sustained way of being. We’re going to have to revisit our relationship with animals in terms of our agricultural industries.
Messaging is key. This has been a pandemic not just of disease, but of misinformation. The only playbook for how we communicate risk in emergencies has been thrown out the window. In this era, people are now dismissive and distrustful of authority and eager to embrace anti-authoritarian identity. Somehow in our culture, we’ve inculcated an anti-authoritarian, anti-expert, anti-education principle, so that is complicating the messaging.
Ideology is a big driver, especially in the United States. Whether you’re pro or anti-COVID science seems to be driven by whichever political stance you gravitate towards. Tribalism is so deeply engrained and cannot be combatted by information alone.
Chronic disease and infectious disease are entangled. Another way to look at this disease is to see it as a rapid acceleration of what is otherwise a slow-moving train wreck of chronic disease. When you look at who is more affected by this disease, especially in the U.S., it is largely minorities, those who are obese, have hypertension, diabetes, or are low-income.
Those kinds of people in correlated factors are more likely to have jobs in which you cannot socially distance, jobs in which you cannot take time off work, no health insurance, no vehicles so they have to take public transit, no opportunities for child care, live in a food desert – and so they are more likely to have these underlying health conditions. These layered effects from a long-term societal approach of disinterest is manifesting in the way of making them more vulnerable in the short-term. A disease like this takes a long-term timeline and compresses it into a couple of weeks, so people who are going to suffer over decades are dying now. So, chronic disease is now shortened.
We’re suffering the dividends of decades of poor investment in education. Somehow, we’ve failed at making science education a core aspect of our curriculum.
The single biggest barrier to combatting this disease is the public. The public must be complicit and compliant in the effort to stop this transmission. Their inability to be partners is why we fail. A big part of that is the failure of compelled science education over the last few decades.
How do we move forward? A greater focus on science education, a greater focus on disentangling the ideological quagmire in which we find ourselves, and a greater focus on data transparency and empowering people to take control of their public health.
In terms of what have we learned, what is the broad public going to take away from this? The polling data suggests that most Canadians are behind the public health narrative and willing to go along with what experts say. There is still a minority that is more iconoclastic. Going forward, Canadians are a bit more invested in infrastructure. There is a lot more desire to repatriate the manufacturing capacity, especially when it comes to masks, syringes, more biotech-focused endeavours, and a desire to better inculcate educational sectors. In the short-term, there seems to be a desire to be better.
What can we do differently to aim public messaging to reach young people? Current public health messaging has a problem as it is one-size-fits-all. What does ‘young person’ mean? We tailor our message to a specific demographic. It’s not just one message, but many. We also use the old-fashioned technique of a ‘carrot and a stick’. The ‘carrot’ is to inspire people and make young people realize there is heroism in protecting others. They might resonate with the message, if you eschew your desire and right to go and socialize en masse, you might save a life.
Can we encourage young people to embrace an ethic of delayed gratification? If you can wait a few weeks or months to socialize, then the payoff will be everything will be open, and you can do whatever you want.
Is there cooperation or competition in vaccine development? Is there any use of artificial intelligence and data sharing? It is thought there is more competition than cooperation. There are certain trade secrets not being shared, but there is a push for greater openness because this should be a species-level endeavor, though there are IP constraints.
A year from now, we might ask, ‘Should there have been a better international framework for rapidity of vaccine development, balancing the need for IP protection to encourage and incentivize private companies to take these risks, while at the same time encouraging data sharing to accelerate the process?” Altruism alone often does not compel the private sector, who is naturally profit-motivated.
What is the zoonosis of this virus, what do we know about it, and where is it going? Even from early on, it was affecting cat and cat-like animals. Viruses tend to affect multiple species. The question is will they learn and steal DNA or RNA from these species that accelerates their evolution such that they can be more infectious. That hasn’t happened yet.
The ability for the virus to jump from a bat to a pangolin to a human is a sign of antigenic shift, which is when it makes a sudden mutation and allows it to gain the ability to infect humans from animal populations. It doesn’t appear to be shifting again to other species yet, but it might.
We should never allow universities to teach entirely STEM classes. Instead, STEAM courses should be prevalent. It is important that we get back to teaching people not just to have a good job, but to have a good life and be a good citizen. Everyone has become so fragile; they cannot tolerate views that don’t fit their own.
There are two layers of cooperation. One is the scientific layer in fighting the disease. The level of cooperation worldwide is phenomenal and there is a huge amount of data being exchanged in real-time about COVID-19. That is cooperation we need to nurture and build upon. It is the most likely path to finding a vaccine.
The other level of cooperation, which is troublesome because it is basically breaking down, is policy-driven cooperation and government-to-government cooperation, notably in the economic and geopolitical space. There is every reason to be concerned about the current picture. The current international system is failing us, and we knew it was happening before the pandemic. There is a critical urgency to reset international institutions.
Pandemics, and natural disasters in general, have a way of revealing strengths and fragilities of the people. It is easy to identify the fragilities in the United States – cracks in the political structure, distrust of authority, tribalistic nature of the population – all exacerbated by this crisis.
In Canada, we have this as well, but we have a more reassuring sense that people do seem to care about each other in a larger sense than they do down south. We need not just science education but arts education as well.
As we move this pandemic from its acute phase to its chronic phase, increasingly the role of humanities experts comes to bear. As a vaccine arrives, how do we have equitable distribution? How do we manage the expectations around it? If the goal of a challenge trial is to expose people to infection to test the efficaciousness of this disease, how does the ethics of this challenge trial unroll? This is where the arts and the humanities bring to bear their skill sets.
In moving from an acute infection to a chronic infection, the larger the number of ideologues who complain, the more difficult this is going to be to solve and this is going to pile up with other problems.
In terms of planning for the future, how much of our planning needs to include a plan to make Canadians healthy? There doesn’t seem to be any public health talk in terms of what you can do to reduce risk factors.
That is the challenge of managing public health in liberal democracies. Any effort we’ve made to encourage people to be healthy has been met with extreme resistance. This is the price we pay for maybe being a bit too lenient on the libertarian side of the democracy, of celebrating the right of the individual to be unwell. The price is, when a pandemic hits, we must all act to protect a fragile but large subset of the population. It’s a question that is a social science, civil liberties, civics-minded question.
Where is the line between authoritarian reach of public health to compel you and encourage you to be healthy, versus the line of the individual citizen in a liberal democracy to celebrate the right to be unwell and therefore to be vulnerable. People smoke too much, drink too much, and don’t exercise. If you solve those three issues, you can begin to reduce expenditures in health care and focus much more on public health.
As the pressures are focused on provincial governments to increase health care expenditures for long-term care and revitalizing the system once the weaknesses are revealed, it’s going to be at the cost of a new generation. You’re going to have an intergenerational conflict in terms of where you make investments. These are going to be difficult challenges we are going to face.
It’s up to high schools to make sure that graduates are good citizens and know about the world, their country, philosophy and literature. At universities you specialize in the field you wish to study.
The reason that international institutions are failing us is because the people who have graduated to positions of authority are poorly educated. This gradual moving away from quality education has been going on since the 1980s and 90s. The solution is going to be long-term as well.
We keep teaching things on the surface, as opposed to teaching people the components that make it work. The two greatest inventions the human species has produced are science and law. They’re similar and based on experience. As you get more experienced with the world, you have nuances that are added to it. Science and law are never fixed.
The most fundamental concept of law is the reasonable man. What would a reasonable person do in any situation? The key to success is cooperation and caring for each other. All the technical gains we’ve made since then has made civilization possible, but none of that would have happened if we hadn’t figured out how to cooperate.
Cooperation is very difficult to get going with everyone. If people cared about each other and really wanted to save each other from the pandemic, the dicta of policies and the core values of basic governance would be much better. The ideals of being on your own isn’t the kind of future that is going to allow us to sustain ourselves.

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