Based loosely on this LessWrongPost.
Last year, for Solstice, I wrote about how the vaccines were coming, and would stop COVID in its tracks. I said, quote: “You are part of the species that will defeat COVID-19.”
That prediction hasn’t worked out great so far.
We failed to control COVID, and it’s now endemic. In this one narrow area, the world has simply gotten worse, more or less permanently, since November of 2019. There’s one more thing you can get that can harm you. One more vaccine on the list of things you need just to be baseline safe in this day and age. It’s not going away anytime soon.
As a relatively young person who hasn’t lived through many long-lasting disasters, I found this… staggering.
It’s worth repeating. Mistakes that our society, our governments, our species make, can result in a world that is just permanently worse. There’s nothing stopping that from happening.
So that sucks.
But I want to take a moment now to talk about a larger trend.
In the years from 1990 to 2017 – so, more or less the past thirty years before COVID – some of the most lethal infectious diseases worldwide have been: lower respiratory infections; diarrheal diseases; malaria; measles; and HIV.
In the year 1990, around 4 million children died of these diseases. In the year 2017, that number was down to less than 1.5 million.
In the past two years, since COVID-19 emerged, over 5.2 million people have died from it. That’s a whole lot. But it’s not nearly as large as the number of children alone who would have died of easily preventable disease, but didn’t, just since 1990.
If you go back even further to compare, we’re doing way, way better. In the year 1900, over a century ago, 800 people per 100,000 per year in the US died of infectious diseases. To do some quick mental math: that’s one in 125. So for example, on average, if you went to a school with around a hundred people in it, one of your classmates would die of infectious disease every year.
By the year 1980, that number was down by over 8 times. And it went down by at least another 2x in the following decades.
We lost to COVID. But over the past century or more, we’ve been winning the larger fight, against all infectious diseases.
There are no rules stopping us from screwing it up, and making things worse. And the tail risk on new disease is worse than ever now, with the world as populated and connected as it is. But at the same time, there are no rules stopping us from making it permanently better. If we can figure out how.
We’ve lost so much. But there’s still a lot left to save.
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