CNN – In 2020, a devastating virus officially disappeared from the continent it had once devastated – a notable achievement for public health that followed decades of work. But you may have missed it.
The eradication of wild polio from Africa in August was hailed as a “big day” by the World Health Organization and celebrated by public health officials.
Still, the arrogant COVID-19 pandemic kept him on the front pages and ensured that an almost fatal blow to a deadly disease would occur with little fanfare.
“It has erased the massive jubilation, publicity and recognition that this milestone deserves,” said Dr. Tunji Funsho, the person most responsible for eradicating wild polio in Nigeria and with her in Africa.
But the moment was “a great sigh of relief,” added Funsho, whose job as president of Rotary International’s polio eradication program in Nigeria earned him a place in Time’s 100 most influential people of 2020.
“Having seen and held children paralyzed by the wild polio virus … that kind of vision has become history,” he told CNN, the scale of the feat still wavering in his voice as he speaks. “No child would ever be paralyzed by the wild polio virus in Nigeria.”
Funsho’s year looks like 2020 in reverse; instead of watching a disease spread indiscriminately and freeze the world in shock, he strangled the last embers of a different virus and released an enormous amount of human potential.
But this is not the only achievement lost amid the stunning 2020 expedition.
Even before COVID-19 existed, humans had an unmistakable and scientifically defined tendency to believe that the world is poorer, angrier and more unstable than it really is; an unconscious desire to cling to negative stereotypes and to ignore the scale of progress that unfolds right in front of us.
It is a habit acquired in childhood and reinforced by media coverage and by our psychological peculiarities, many experts believe. Simply put, we think the world is a bad place that is getting worse – a feeling that has undoubtedly grown in the past 12 months.
The only problem? They were wrong.
“I am a born optimist,” said Funsho, reflecting on the challenges his years-long effort has encountered: from a Boko Haram insurgency that prevented children in northern Nigeria from being vaccinated against polio, to treacherous terrain that forced his team to travel by motorcycle, donkey and camel to shoot.
“When the world comes together for a common purpose – to improve the lives of all the citizens of the world, no matter where they live – we can achieve that,” he said. “I was very optimistic and I proved to be right.”
Good things continued to happen in 2020, even as the loss and isolation spread on an epic scale.
And, according to several scientists and data experts, achievements like Funsho’s are constantly taking place in a rapidly evolving world. We are not just paying attention.
‘This is probably the best of times’
“In a world with a lot of problems, you are kind of forbidden to talk about good things,” lamented Ola Rosling. Rosling co-authored a best-selling book, “Factfulness”, which sought to educate people about the underestimated improvements in global poverty, health and well-being.
Rosling is part of a group of experts that forces people to think differently about our world. And in 2020, your efforts are particularly poignant.
“Even during the years without a pandemic, people are reluctant to believe that the world is better than it used to be,” he told CNN. “We can improve the world a lot. There are many problems,” he admitted. “But I think the main problem is our mentality.”
Changing that mindset has been the mission of Rosling and her late father, Hans. His 2018 book was hailed by Bill Gates, who paid any graduate in the United States to buy it for free. And it revealed an alarming human tendency; when the authors asked thousands of people around the world to estimate rates of extreme poverty, girls in education, children vaccinated against measles and dozens of other measures, respondents systematically assumed that each measure was 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 could get one of three questions right, beating most humans in the process,” Hans Rosling wrote in 2015.
“There is no party or political divide in this misunderstanding,” said Ola Rosling, who now runs the Gapminder organization, to CNN. “In a changing world, systematically, on the left and on the right, people are equally out of date about the world.”
It seems that we do not want to abandon these negative assumptions. 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 like blue dots, threatening faces or unethical actions .
“We found that when participants looked for a category that became less common over time, they ‘expanded’ that category to include more things,” the study’s lead author, David Levari, told CNN. “So when blue dots became rare, people called a wider range of colors blue. When threatening faces became rare, people called a wider range of facial expressions threatening.”
“These findings suggest that when people are on the alert for something negative that is becoming less common, instead of celebrating their good fortune, they can start to find that negative thing in more places than before,” he said.
Outdated assumptions are passed down from generation to generation, taught during childhood and reinforced by media coverage of negative but exceptional events, suggested Rosling.
And when things get really bad, like in 2020, the human tendency to assume the worst matters. “In our worldview, any major catastrophe immediately becomes the worst catastrophe of all time,” said Rosling.
“The world is in very bad shape, but this is probably the best of times,” he added. “And most people can’t imagine that, because of how our brains are connected.”
Finding good points in a difficult year
Negativity may be a human tendency, but experts say that challenging it can help us put even a year as complicated as 2020 in its proper context.
The pandemic, for example, has stalled efforts to resolve a series of scientific achievements. But it also covered up a number of achievements – and ensured that we spend much more time focusing on a new health crisis, rather than celebrating the fact that others are slowly but surely coming to an end.
One of these milestones was achieved by a team of doctors, including virologist Ravindra Gupta, who cured HIV in one person only the second time; 2019 achievement that became public knowledge in March.
“It was great news,” Gupta told CNN. “The first time it happened was almost 10 years ago, and people couldn’t do it again, so people wondered if this was real or if it was a fluke.”
“This reinforces the hope that a cure for HIV is possible,” said Richard Jefferys, director of scientific projects for the Treatment Action Group in the United States.
The pandemic also spawned a historically rapid vaccine that rewrote all rules about how quickly such an injection could be produced.
“I think it is unique,” said David Matthews, professor of virology at the University of Bristol, about the multiple vaccine candidates to be approved or close to 2020. “It is important to remember that at the beginning of the year we literally had no idea if any vaccine is possible 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 used for the first time in some COVID-19 vaccines could work against a wide variety 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 I can remember, people are listening to scientists directly and regularly. And I think people like what they hear, [about] how we think about a problem, how we make assessments, how we react to different situations, “he told CNN.
“I think it is a really important and positive development, and that we need to build on.”
Progress breeds progress: as wild polio was stifled in Africa, Funsho told CNN that his team quickly reused its operation to combat COVID-19 in the region, protecting it from the virus in ways that would otherwise be impossible.
And the crisis may have even more profound implications elsewhere. “This pandemic has helped us to see all the real actors in what we call society – all these people in uniform, who were always talked about badly,” said Rosling.
“I think it’s sharpening our seriousness about what a society really is and the kind of solidarity needed to keep it going.”
Meanwhile, Rosling makes a point of highlighting the constant but vital improvements that have taken place behind the scenes.
“The trends that really shape and shape the life of the future generation are things that never appear in the news,” he said. He cited increased access to electricity, declining childbirth mortality and progress against diseases like malaria and polio as sources of light that shone throughout the year.
“To realize how good the world is and how many things are improving, first you have to confront people’s worldview and show them that, in fact, no, you are very wrong,” he summarized.
“Being aware of progress makes you realize that the problems that you hear tonight, you hear because we are going to try to solve them.”
“The problems must be resolved,” concluded Rosling. “And we’ve been able to solve the biggest problems historically.”
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