Talk politics.

The experience of last year [1, 2, 3] suggested quite strongly in favour of elimination as a strategy for SARS-Cov-2, rather than a suppression strategy. After the experiences of the original and alpha strains of SARS-Cov-2, it should be quite clear by the numbers that "go hard, go fast" is a successful approach. It means restricting movement and interaction between people (the virus doesn't move, people do), putting up strong fences to demarcate an area and block the potential entry of the infected.

The results speak for themselves; from Australian states like Victoria, which remarkably reached elimination from high numbers, Western Australia, and Tasmania, to countries like New Zealand, Taiwan, and China. The strategy of trying to achieve zero cases was a proven success, with the three aforementioned countries having the lowest case numbers per capita in the developed world. As a grim irony to those who recommended that a policy of suppression in fear of the economic damage that an elimination strategy would cause, the numbers do not lie; those countries and regions that adopted an elimination strategy were able to recover quickly and more completely and there suffered less economic damage than those which did not [4].
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A few days ago, the SARS-CoV-19 virus reached two hundred million cases, with over four million dead. We know these numbers are almost certainly under-estimations based on data collection limits and comparisons of death rates from previous years. It is with the benefit of hindsight that we now realise that the entire year of 2020 was, in fact, "the first wave" of increasing infections which did not peak until early January 2021 at close to 840,000 new cases a day, and its nadir in mid-February at a mere 400,000. Since then we have witnessed the rise of the new and more contagious and deadly Delta variant which peaked at the end of April with 875,000 new cases as it overwhelmed India. That peak declined to a low of around 300,000 new daily cases in mid-June, only to rise again as the variant spread to densely populated regions in South-East Asia; at the time of writing the daily new case numbers are at 688,000 and are on an upwards trajectory.

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From the very start of this pandemic, there have been both warnings and effective solutions. We knew that excess human exploitation of the natural world pushes the probability of zootonic diseases and that this is a direct function of land clearing, the increasing consumption of animal proteins, and land privitisation. All of this was known, but public health is an externality to private profit. We know that the most effective way to develop a vaccine is through a fixed reward system with public disclosure to allow for the production of generics, and the mass distribution of these according to need. But again, private profits get in the way of good public health policy. Whilst presenting the best information and our best knowledge on economics and health is necessary, it is insufficient. We still live in a political economy in which both individuals and institutions care about their positional advantage first, and the facts second, and that will not change through goodwill alone. It requires the force of public protest and public organisation; the very lives of people depend on it.