What can netball teach us about pandemics? If you follow it, as I do (my favourite sport), you'll have…
What can netball teach us about pandemics? If you follow it, as I do (my favourite sport), you'll have noticed that the rest of the world is getting closer to Australia. Why that's happening I think is a powerful lesson about pandemics too. /1 https://t.co/vP0MbRAsm2
Almost certainly this gap is closing because Australia has run a very generous system of allowing pretty much an unlimited number of foreign players to play in the local comp, easily the most competitive in the world. /2
Doing that has allowed foreign players to learn how to play like Australia, and how to (sometimes) beat them. The parallels with infectious pathogens are obvious. If you give them the opportunity to evolve by not controlling their transmission, they will always eventually win. /3
They're so much more numerous than us, and the evolutionary landscape so open to even the most bizarre novelties, that allowing them free rein in human hosts will deliver them victory on a plate. /4
It's why you can't understand pandemics or infectious disease more generally with a focus on a small, finite timespan. Evolution doesn't really happen fast, mostly. With netball it wasn't one year of foreign players playing here. It took quite a lot of years. /5
But if you let time pass, the transition is inevitable. Also why even with infectious diseases with apparently 'sterilising vaccines, the public health control guidelines still talk about restrictions on transmission. The two HAVE to go together. A vaccine is not a medication. /6
It's an intervention into an evolving ecosystem, by its nature transient and subject to change. As I discovered myself in my adult life when I contracted whooping cough, despite being fully vaccinated. /7
And this is why I will keep asking why we're allowing the definition of a pandemic to be shifted from amounts of infections, to amounts of severe illness. Add time to the equation and they're functionally equivalent things. /8
Knocking some severe disease on the head today, with a Covid vaccine for example, without controlling transmission just means delaying the inevitable defeat of those vaccines by the pathogen. /9
P.S. for netball, it's improved the game, closing the gap. But you never want pathogens to be in the game in the first place, with infectious disease. Them winning is you being sick, and dying. /end