Back around 2007-2009 there was a risk of bird flu in central Europe. We had a local ban on washing cars except in fully automated car washes, it wasn't controversial at all. We just went along with it.

That's very different then shuting down the economy and locking people in their houses. I am not saying I think the response was unreasonable (at least initially) but many people cleary did.

What is the link between car washing and spreading bird flu?

Car visits a farm with infected chickens, picks up dirt with viruses on the wheels, brings it into cities.

This is one way how it spreads from farm to farm.

We have lots of trees in the area, it was said not to get close to bird poops and avoid contact with water where birds pollute.

I'm presuming birds poop on cars, spraying the cars with a hose puts droplets of it in the air.

If I recall, the decision to quarantine people who had contracted Ebola was totally uncontroversial, but I can’t speculate as to how that willingness would scale.

Yea I was in college during Swine Flu and it was mostly treated as a joke. It became an excuse to miss class and the closest the college came to taking it seriously were some strongly worded recommendations to not leave your dorm if you have it.

Of course that _might_ be because it wasn’t that bad. But if you get to the point that it’s spreading that regularly you’ve already lost the ability to control it regardless of severity.

My armchair theory is that it’s partly a marketing problem. Covid was treated with more fear because it was “the coronavirus” at first. Everyone has had “the flu” before, but nobody had had the spooky “coronavirus” at that point (even if they had—they just hadn’t heard of it). “It’s just the flu bro” is a difficult mindset to overcome.

The same marketing problem existed with CVEs before Heartbleed. CVE-2014-0160 just doesn’t sound as frightening.

Covid was treated with fear because it was massively contagious.

COVID was treated with more fear due to the impact of academic modelling, and in particular the models by Neil Ferguson's group at Imperial College. I remember the sequencing quite well here, the massive freakout and sudden interest in extreme lockdowns appeared immediately after Ferguson went to the press because his models predicted sky high casualty rates if lockdowns weren't implemented immediately.

In reality his models were full of bugs, stupid assumptions and were generally unvalidated garbage tier work that didn't match reality at all. A few other epidemiologists pointed that out at the time, but governments are completely undiscerning when it comes to "science" and the press love bad news, so they went with it. End results were wildly off what he predicted.

I think it was more watching people die gruesomely on ventilators in the early days and worries that could be widespread. In fact most people had already had the "four known seasonal coronaviruses (non-Covid-19)" but not really noticed as they are like the common cold.

I guess you missed the part with overwhelmed hospitals and grave yards.

Apparently we had the capability for collective action at one time, but most of us weren't around then.

The political order of the New Deal lasted from roughly the Great Depression until about 1980. It wasn't just about government actions, it was more about how most people understood the world what it means to live a good life. That way of thinking about the world enabled collective action to improve the standard of living for most people, reduce poverty and inequality, give most people better health, housing and longer lives, faster and safer transportation, dignity in old age, etc.

But that political order was replaced by neoliberalism, which started in the 1980s and probably ended at the 2008 financial collapse. Again, it was not only a new political order, it was a shift in how people understood the world and their place in it. It was a time of deregulation, globalized commerce and capital flows, and the supremacy of market-based solutions. We got dramatic increases in inequality, unimaginable individual wealth combined with tent cities and a resurgence of infectious disease.

It's hard to imagine accomplishing big collective goals like building an interstate highway system, or implementing social security, or winning a world war against fascism, if all that hadn't been done already.

We might not even be capable of maintaining what previous generations were able to build from nothing.

I've spent my life swimming in the water of neoliberalism so it's almost impossible to imagine that there are alternatives. It feels like effective collective action for the greater good has never been possible and never will be.