For thousands of years food production relied on human labour, and about 90 per cent of people worked in farming. While in some parts of the developing world the human experience was still reminiscent of past plagues, in much of the developed world the digital revolution changed everything.Ĭonsider agriculture. Even more importantly, automation and the internet made extended lockdowns viable, at least in developed countries. In contrast, in 2020 digital surveillance made it far easier to monitor and pinpoint the disease vectors, meaning that quarantine could be both more selective and more effective. And if you ordered the entire population of a country to stay at home for several weeks, it would have resulted in economic ruin, social breakdown and mass starvation. In 1918 you could quarantine people who came down with the dreaded flu, but you couldn’t trace the movements of pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers. In previous eras humanity could seldom stop epidemics because humans couldn’t monitor the chains of infection in real time, and because the economic cost of extended lockdowns was prohibitive. Moving life onlineĪlongside the unprecedented achievements of biotechnology, the Covid year has also underlined the power of information technology. In the war between humans and pathogens, never have humans been so powerful. Within less than a year several effective vaccines were in mass production. Within a few more months it became clear which measures could slow and stop the chains of infection. By January 10 2020, scientists had not only isolated the responsible virus, but also sequenced its genome and published the information online. The first alarm bells about a potential new epidemic began sounding at the end of December 2019.
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