an historic lesson

[mellowtigger]

First an aside: By choosing "an" in the title, you automatically know that I pronounce the next word as "istoric". The English language insists that a consonant separate those two vowel sounds, which is the whole reason for the existence for the extra article "an".  It's easier for the mouth-shapes that we form with smooth transition.  I don't know why I drop the "h" sound in this usage but pronounce "history" by itself with a noticeable "h" sound. I'm sure there's more linguistic history there too.

Another interesting paper released this week is not really about COVID-19 but instead about the history of medicine as it applies to airborne pathogens.

Since the early 20th century, there has been resistance to accept that diseases transmit through the air, which was particularly damaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. A key reason for this resistance lies in the history of the scientific understanding of disease transmission: Transmission through the air was thought dominant during most of human history, but the pendulum swung too far in the early 20th century. For decades, no important disease was thought to be airborne. By clarifying this history and the errors rooted in it that still persist, we hope to facilitate progress in this field in the future.
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ina.13070

Basically, we replaced "miasma" with modern science, but we mistakenly consigned the notion of air transmission to that abandoned past.  It's maybe the best explanation I've seen for why we're handling this pandemic so badly, but it's still insufficient, I think, without also including capitalist concerns.