leotardsanity
Cute how you completely failed to address the first half of my reply which is the much more pressing matter and does apply to a large portion of the world. I'm not asking you for a solution or a hard date I'm just saying that "ohh we'll eventually have a vaccine in a year or two" is an INCREDIBLY dry platitude for those of us who stand to become homeless or be dramatically uprooted (I could move back in with my parents, but they live in another state) if this isn't solved in a month or two.
Have something to say?
My dude I’m a science blogger. If you want political answers, and you obviously do: ask a fucking politician of poli-sci major.
I can only tell you what the scientific stand of things, and that is: fuck if we know how long it takes or how bad it’ll get. Your country has done some pretty disasterous mismanagement at the start of this, paired with a truly horrid healthcare system. I can’t fix that. Nobody can fix that right now anymore. Your government fucked up and no amount of science will allow timetravel to undo that damage.
Like seriously, what do you think a biology blogger from Germany is going to be able to tell you? I‘m sticking with the facts here. The facts are that chances of this being ‘solved’ in a month or two are asymptotic to zero. It’s a pandemic with an R0 of somewhere between 2 and 3. That means that unless you stop half to two-thirds of infections from happening, this disease won’t stop.
That’s what we’re all handling right now. And you seriously, honestly, have the gall to complain that scientists are taking ‘too long’ to find a fix for a disease they’ve never seen before, know very little about, and that spreads like wildfire? People ARE on the frontlines and doing their best, but treatment studies take time! Vaccine development takes time! You cannot rush those things, unless of course you want to have either a useless product (best case) or one that actively harms people in the short or long run (worst case)
I understand being upset, but you’re upset at the wrong people here. The ones who could have diminished the impact are not scientists. It’s the people in charge who refused to take action until it was too late. And there’s still actions they can take to mitigate this. They could do like what Germany has done, and make it illegal to evict renters who fall behind on payment during this crisis. Thus, taking a lot of pressure off renters. They could instate paid sickleave, effective immediately, for workers, to ensure people don’t show up to work while ill because they can’t take the paycuts.
But that’s not on scientists. That’s on politicians who have to get a move on, right now. It’s their fault if they don’t, not the poor people from the CDCs who do their best with what they have. Not the researchers’ across the globe who frantically try to work out a vaccine. Not the medical personels’ at the hospital who are running drug trials right now, desperate for something that’ll bring death tolls down.