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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is naive, but I would assume if it was a bio-weapon it would be a lot more deadly.

Funny, I would have assumed the opposite. Nobody wins a war by releasing a doomsday virus that indiscriminately kills 5% of the world. But they can win battles by temporarily incapacitating an army, with no fear of loss of their own life if the winds blow in the opposite direction.

Viruses which kill too quickly don't spread widely enough to kill a lot of people.

Good viruses kill after a few days of showing few (if any) symptoms so that they can maximise their spread.

This is the difference between epidemic and pandemic viral contagions.

But the point of a bio weapon is not to kill everyone,just your enemy. So i guess you would want it to be very deadly and not spread to far. And i imagine you would want to primarily take out young healthy people (soldiers) not the eldery and sickly. (I assume)

This virus spreads quickly (check) but has a mortality rate of 2%, mostly the old and already immunocompromised. If that's a bioweapon it's a pretty ineffective one.

If you want to extinct homo sapiens you should probably make a virus that infects everybody and has as little symptoms as possible and then kills them a year later.

We don't know yet if this virus has any long-term consequences. HIV would seem harmless if we estimated its effects after 1 month.

But I don't think bioweapons need to be deadly. If you can make a virus that kills 2% of people but shuts down global trade with your main economic competitor for example - that's quite useful (if you don't care for morality of course).

I'm not persuaded it's human-created, but it's a possibility.

2% so far, it's very early in the lifecycle of this epidemic and most people go days without showing any symptoms.

The mortality rate will rapidly increase as it spreads to areas where it can overwhelm the local infrastructure. Not every country is capable of creating hospitals in 6 days like China, and China has a lot of experience responding to these crises since the Sars days.

We are only a month in, it's too early to really count mortality.

It might not be a bioweapon. It might be an economic weapon.

Well, it's a Made in China bio Weapon..

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