24 | When History Repeats Itself
Hey guys,
This week, I released a video 🎬 about one of my recent trips to Berlin 🇩🇪 and I talked about the 4 lessons I learnt and why I want to go back, at some point when we're allowed to travel again.
Berlin is one of those places where you have a date with history. So I started to reflect about historic recurrence. When writing the script of the video I asked myself: is it true that the picture never changes, only the frame around it?
There's a book from Laura Spinney called Pale Rider and it's about the Spanish flu of 1918-1920 with some interesting elements that we can relate to today's pandemic. 📚
The pandemic at some point ended. There were limited treatments and no vaccine so the flu ran its course and then ended.
Face masks. There was some interesting analysis here confirming that just because they adopted masks early they managed to reduce the death toll by half!
Confinement. Still the same rules, big gatherings were forbidden back in the days too.
There were asymptomatic people just like now. In fact, the key spread and transmission came from those with no symptoms.
Hell immunity not needed. The other measures they took led to contain the virus.
Reproduction rate (R). The book also highlighted the famous R value we see these days in the news. If > 1, then the spread to more people can happen. So R value is a result of DOTS (Duration of infection, Opportunities for spread, Transmission probability, Susceptibility to infection).
It feels like there are very valuable lessons from that period that can help reduce the R value and halt the spread. Isn't it what happened in New Zealand for example?
My point is that pandemics, financial crisis, and all these events are cycles and repeat from time to time. Our brain has an impressive ability to erase memories to learn new stuff. That's how it works. 🧠
I feel sad about the pandemic and everything that happened but on the other side I'm very optimistic about the future and I think life will never be the same. This is a moment of disruption for every industry in the world and for us as humans.
I live in the present but I can't stop thinking about our future and how I can contribute to make our world a better place because what's the point if we don't learn from the past events? History repeats itself.
Have a great week and enjoy the content below!
Alejandro
🎯 This Week’s Quote
“The music industry should be a great cautionary tale: Don't let that happen to you. Get ahead of it.”
Disrupt Yourself by Jay Samit
📝 This Week's Blog Post
Last year I’ve done a sensational trip to Germany. In this post I want to share with you 4 lessons I learnt and why I want to go back. Welcome to Berlin.
Read more: 4 Lessons I Learnt In Berlin
🎥 This Week's Video
Hey guys, in this video I'll be sharing some key thoughts about Germany, particularly Berlin, a place worth visiting as soon as we can.
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