CNN – In 2020, a devastating virus officially disappeared from the continent it had once devastated – a remarkable achievement in the field of public health that followed decades of work. But maybe you missed it.
The eradication of wild polio in Africa in August was hailed as a “great day” by the World Health Organization and celebrated by public health officials.
However, the pandemic COVID-19 kept it on the front pages and ensured that an almost fatal blow to a deadly disease took place with little fanfare.
“It has shattered the massive jubilation, publicity and recognition of such a stage worthwhile,” said Dr. Tunji Funsho, who is more responsible than anyone else for eradicating wild polio in Nigeria and, with it, Africa.
But the moment was “a huge sigh of relief,” added Funsho, whose chair of Rotary International’s polio eradication program in Nigeria has brought him a place in the Top 100 Most Influential People by 2020.
“After seeing and keeping children paralyzed by the wild polio virus … that kind of view has become history,” he told CNN, the scale of the realization still faltering in his voice as he spoke. “No child will be paralyzed by the wild polio virus in Nigeria.”
The Funsho Year reads as 2020 in reverse; rather than pursuing a disease that spread without discrimination and froze the world in shock, he strangled the last embers of another virus and unlocked huge amounts of human potential.
But his is not the only achievement that is lost amid the dizzying expedition that was 2020.
Even before COVID-19 existed, people had an unmistakable and scientifically identified tendency to believe that the world is poorer, angrier, and more restless than it really is; an unconscious desire to hold on to negative stereotypes and to ignore the scale of progress that is unfolding right in front of us.
It is a habit taken over in childhood and strengthened by the media and our own psychological peculiarities, many experts believe. We simply believe that the world is a bad place that is getting worse – a feeling that has undoubtedly increased in the last 12 months.
The only problem? We’re wrong.
“I am a born optimist,” Funsho said, reflecting on the challenges his effort has faced over the years: from a Boko Haram insurgency that prevented children in northern Nigeria from being vaccinated against polio to the ground. treacherous who forced his team to travel by motorcycle, donkey and camel to make fires.
“When the world comes together for a common goal – to improve the lives of every citizen of the world, no matter where they live – we can do that,” he said. “I was pretty optimistic and I proved myself right.”
Good things continued to happen in 2020, even though the loss and isolation spread on an epic scale.
And, according to dozens of scientists and data experts, achievements like Funsho’s are constantly unfolding in a rapidly improving world. We just don’t pay attention.
“This is probably the best time”
“In a world with a lot of problems, you’re kind of forbidden to talk about good things,” lamented Ola Rosling. Rosling is the co-author of a bestselling book, Factfulness, which has sought to educate people about underestimated improvements in poverty, health and well-being worldwide.
Rosling is part of the group of experts that forces people to think differently about our world. And in 2020, their efforts are particularly strong.
“Even in the years without a pandemic, people are very reluctant to believe that the world is better than before,” he told CNN. “We could make the world a lot better. There are a lot of problems,” he said. “But I think the main problem is our mentality.”
Changing this mentality was the mission of Rosling and her late father, Hans. Their 2018 book was hailed by Bill Gates, who paid for any US college graduate to buy it for free. And it revealed an alarming human tendency; when the authors asked thousands of people around the world to estimate extreme poverty rates, girls in education, children vaccinated against measles and dozens of other values, respondents systematically assumed that every measure is worse than it is.
In fact, if the authors had “placed a banana next to each of the three (options) and let a few chimpanzees choose the answers, they might be expected to receive one of three correct questions, beating most people in the process,” Hans Rosling wrote in 2015.
“There is no partisan or political division in this misconception,” Ola Rosling, who now runs the Gapminder organization, told CNN. “In a changing world, systemically, left and right, people are just as old as the world.”
It seems that we do not want to give up these negative hypotheses. In a 2018 study cited by psychologists, including Canadian-American author Steven Pinker, as evidence of people’s ignorance of global improvements, Harvard researchers asked participants to look for different things, such as blue dots, threatening faces, or unethical actions.
“We found that when participants were looking for a category that became less common over time, they ‘expanded’ that category to include more things,” study lead author David Levari told CNN. blue dots have become rare, people have called a wider range of blue colors. When threatening faces became rare, people called for a wider range of threatening facial expressions. “
“These findings suggest that when people are alert to something negative that is becoming less common, rather than celebrating their luck, they may begin to find that negative thing in more places than usual,” he said. he said.
Outdated hypotheses are passed down through the generations, taught as children and reinforced by the media coverage of negative but exceptional events, Rosling suggested.
And when things get very bad, like in 2020, the human tendency to take on the worst problems. “In our view of the world, any huge catastrophe immediately becomes the worst catastrophe ever,” Rosling said.
“The world is in a very bad state, but this is probably the best time,” he added. “And most people can’t imagine that, because of the way our brains are connected.”
Finding positive aspects in a difficult year
Negativity can be a human tendency, but experts say a challenge can help us put even a year as difficult as 2020 in its proper context.
For example, the pandemic has stopped efforts to solve any number of scientific achievements. But it also covered a range of achievements – and assured us that we spent much more time focusing on a new health crisis, rather than celebrating the fact that others are slowly but surely coming to an end.
Such a stage was reached by a team of doctors, including virologist Ravindra Gupta, who cured HIV in one person only a second time; an achievement made in 2019 that became public in March.
“It was really huge news,” Gupta told CNN. “It first happened almost 10 years ago, and people had never been able to do it again, so people wondered if this was real or if it was a coincidence.”
“It strengthens the hope that a cure for HIV is possible,” said Richard Jefferys, scientific project director at the US Treatment Task Force.
The pandemic also led to a historically rapid vaccine, which rewrote all the rules on how quickly such a blow could be produced.
“I think it’s unique,” said David Matthews, a professor of virology at the University of Bristol, among the many candidates to come or get approved in 2020. “It’s important to remember that at the beginning of the year we were literally aware. it would not be possible to have any vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. “
“We are entering a new era of vaccine development,” added Andrew Preston of the University of Bath. There is even hope that the mRNA technology first used in some COVID-19 vaccines could work against a wide range of other infections, including cancer.
And the crisis has also given rise to a renewed appreciation of scientific work, according to Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “For the first time in my life, people hear from scientists on a regular basis. And I think people like what they hear, [about] the way we think through a problem, the way we make assessments, the way we react to different situations, “he told CNN.
“I think it’s a very important and positive development that we need to build on.”
Progress is making progress: as wild polio has been suppressed in Africa, Funsho told CNN that his team quickly reopened its COVID-19 operation in the region, protecting it from the virus in a way that would otherwise it would have been impossible.
And the crisis could have had even deeper implications elsewhere. “This pandemic has helped us see all the real actors in what we call society – all these people in uniform, who have always been talked about badly,” Rosling said.
“I think it emphasizes our seriousness about what a society really is and the kind of solidarity needed to keep it running.”
Meanwhile, Rosling wants to highlight the constant but vital improvements that have taken place in the background.
“The trends that really shape and shape the lives of the next generation are things that never appear in the news,” he said. He cited increased access to electricity, declining birth mortality and progress against diseases such as malaria and polio as sources of light that shone throughout the year.
“To realize how good the world is and how much things are improving, you must first confront people’s view of the world and show them that, in fact, no, you are very wrong,” he summed up.
“Awareness of progress makes you realize that the problems you hear tonight, you hear them because we will try to solve them.”
“The problems are to be solved,” Rosling concluded. “And we’ve managed to solve the biggest problems historically.”
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