Mass tragedies sometimes have unexpected consequences.
...Of course, for meaningful lessons to be learned from a tragedy — whether a factory fire or a pandemic — you have to begin by acknowledging the facts of the event itself. The rise of Covid denialism, in America and elsewhere, is often taken as a reason to doubt that any progress will grow out of the tragedy of Covid-19. But as depressing as anti-science belligerence can sometimes be, there is abundant evidence that we are learning from this epidemic. To begin with, the period from March 2020 to May 2020 almost certainly marked the most significant short-term change ever in worldwide human behavior. Vast sections of the planet effectively froze in place for a few months, and then adopted, en masse, a whole new set of routines to flatten the curve and slow the spread — a genuinely new trick for Homo sapiens. It was not obvious in advance that such a thing was even possible.
Imagine, if you can bear it, what happens the next time word emerges of a novel virus devastating a midsize city somewhere in the world. The slow-motion reaction that characterized the global response to the news from Wuhan in early 2020 would be radically accelerated. Even without public-health mandates, a significant part of the world’s population, particularly in cosmopolitan cities that were hit hard in the early days of Covid, would instantly mask up; where possible, workers would switch back to Zoom; unnecessary travel would cease. No doubt some portion of the population would play down the magnitude of the threat or invent a preposterous conspiracy theory to explain it. But a meaningful number of people would switch back into the “pandemic mode” they learned in 2020-21...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/magazine/covid-progress.html?smid=em-share
