5 January

Mike Ryan, one of the WHO’s most senior public health experts, on what we’ve done wrong in this pandemic. Really worth a minute of your time. Particularly on the last sentence, notice how our leaders have the whole time tried to paint efforts as ‘restrictions’ and sold every partial win as ‘freedom’. That’s not how to lead anything. Leaders in wartime steel their people for a prolonged fight. Pandemics kill hundreds of millions more than wars do. “The biggest collective failing has been that we’ve underestimated this microbe. We’ve always made judgments assuming the best-case scenario. And I’m not one for assuming the worst-case scenarios as a modus operandi, because otherwise, you can strangle society. But I think at every opportunity we’ve seem to have taken the best-case scenario as the basis for our policy. And this virus, I think, has sequentially exploited that. In the end, the virus doesn’t have a brain. It’s just, from an evolutionary point of view, exploiting opportunities. And we seem to have consistently and persistently given it the opportunity. There’s been tremendous social, economic, and political pressure to go back to normal. Time and time again governments have tried to get back to normal and have overshot that runway by opening up too early. Releasing restrictions too early. They haven’t really convinced people or empowered people to continue with these basic measures to reduce the risk of infection. I think that’s been a problem, the whole way through the pandemic. I don’t mean getting rid of lockdowns. To me lockdowns have been last resort measures in most cases. Many countries in the East have managed to forgo lockdowns. But they’ve maintained quite strict measures in terms of mask wearing, in terms of crowds, in terms of testing and other stuff. So they’ve taken a much more comprehensive, layered strategy. They’ve maintained an intensity of control measures without ever going for full lockdown, without ever going for full open. They’ve taken the corner without under- or over-steering. They’ve gotten people to buy into the idea that it’s going to take a long time and it’s going to have to be a sustained effort. I think if everyone had done that maybe we’d be in a better place. ”