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There were roughly two approaches to the disease taken by developed countries, one I will call “socio-technical” and was used primarily in Asia and Australasia, but also in some notable Western countries like Uruguay, the Baltics, the Nordics
bar Sweden and to a lesser extent Canada and Germany. The second was what I’d call “technology-first” and was central in the US and UK especially (many others had a mix). The first approach emphasized coordinated efforts to use an integration of social, economic and
organizational levers together with preexisting technologies or small rapid innovations on them to get TTSI, masking, mobility limitations and public space restructuring rapidly up to scale to suppress the disease, and to worry about major technological breakthroughs like
vaccines second. The second approach was to view the social and political challenges of the first approach as insurmountable and thus to use a combination of on-and-off lockdowns with a huge focus on vaccine development and manufacture
(and a fair bit less on distribution and social infrastructure of delivery).
The countries adopting the first approach has seen extremely limited loss of life, sero prevalence levels around 1% or sometimes much less and limited or in some cases
The countries adopting the first approach has seen extremely limited loss of life, sero prevalence levels around 1% or sometimes much less and limited or in some cases
no detectable economic costs and the political systems, at least in the democracies among these, has emerged stronger, more democratic and more consensual than ever before. They have also not seen major breakthroughs on vaccines or other eye-catching purely technical achievements
The second group are, based on the latest data, around 30% seroprevalence and will probably hit 40% before the vaccine is widely administered, suggesting that they have lost close to 2/3 of those who would have died in uncontrolled spread.
They have also generally seen unprecedented-since-WWII economic losses and political strain. On the other hand, they saw by an order of magnitude the most rapid development of an efficacious novel vaccine in human history.
We have a choice between these two paths in our broader social trajectory; there is nothing inevitable or culturally predestined about one or the other. I know which I prefer. There is nothing about the socio-technical path that disregards or ignores the value of breakthroughs
on vaccines…they are complementary. But if we ignore, undermine, and sideline the importance of the social integration of technology, vaccines and other technical breakthroughs will fail, just as in this case. And I think that if we don’t start bridging the divide between
technology and society after yesterday’s and last year’s events, I lack confidence anything will bring us to do so.
Inspired by my work with @dsallentess, @divyasiddarth, @pujalight and others. More on this soon from @dsallentess and me, but felt the need to put out something brief now given current events.
