What caused the Black Death and could it strike again? (2016) | Hacker News Reader

What caused the Black Death and could it strike again? (2016)

aeon.co

The US Rocky Mountain region gets a handful of cases every year. It's easily treatable with antibiotics if caught early.

Idaho just got a case a week or two ago! The kid will be alright because of antibiotics.

According to this article, "Even with the best treatment, some 14 per cent of pneumonic plague victims still die."

Over 80% of plague cases in the United States are of the bubonic form, which is less often fatal. [0]

The case of the boy in Idaho is bubonic.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html

Yersinia pestis, and your choice of "no" and "yes, this happens yearly"

I understand the article, but its quite a wide berth to just stop OBOR for that, the routes also foster more efficient trade and commercial activity between hubs.

Yeah, it must be able to travel on people or their possessions in airplanes. I don't think it's fair to just blame China for moving it along, when there are many many other vectors. If there's some special reason obor is dangerous, call it out. Otherwise, airplanes exist!

Well, iff the reader accounts for the headline's question implicit qualifier: "could it strike us again" where we probably aren't in China or Kazakhstan ...

... then Betteridge's Law applies as always.

(But seriously, this qualifier almost always applies when discussing any kind of non-universal disaster or malaise. Some resource-stripped sh&thole on the other side of the world could get overrun by zombies and it still needn't matter to us because it's only a resource-stripped sh&thole.)

>and it still needn't matter to us because it's only a resource-stripped sh&thole

Yeah, if it was a resource-plenty shithole it would matter more, since it could be plundered. /s

There's also the fact that those suffering will still be people in either case, but who cares for that when they're living bit outside of shitholes /s

Your words ring true at face value.

Zombies are a physical impossibility, so nobody sensible worries about zombie attacks.

> so nobody sensible worries about zombie attacks

As an interesting aside to this comment: https://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombie/index.htm

I guess the CDC does this in good faith but for military, zombie scenarios are a way to prepare for civilian uprisings without explicitly naming it. Easier to make a "zombie plague preparedness" exercise than a "Trump supporters take arms when their president is impeached".

Zombies are a local inside enemy that allow training on the domestic territory. Hard to name a fictional enemy that would not make headlines otherwise.

It’s not necessarily that, it can also be tacitly referring to external civilian influxes, such as mass migration events. Either way, it’s a grim business that few people seem to grasp the full import of.

Would a generic "terrorists" label spur too much controversy?

Terrorists that would take over a whole civilian area and are able to send waves of thousands of infantry? Yes, clearly.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. I was using "overrun by zombies" as both a hyperbole and as a shorthand for "beset by insert the worst disaster that doesn't need geography to occur (e.g. tsunamis and typhoons)".

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