The deadlier a virus is, the earlier it will trip alarm systems/panic. And as we've all learned in the past few weeks, in outbreaks days matter.
The perfect virus is balanced: just deadly enough.
It's possible SARS-CoV-2 hits the sweet spot.
The perfect virus is balanced: just deadly enough.
It's possible SARS-CoV-2 hits the sweet spot.
It is not the only virus. Rabies, also has 100% mortality.
I remember that first newspaper articles on the mystery disease in the early 80's. They were only 1 inch or 2 inches long and talked about mystery cases of Kaposi's Sarcoma at first, then mysterious pneumonia cases. Then a tidal wave of longer articles as it became an epidemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaposi's_sarcoma
A former roommate of mine was a nurse in Toronto General's AIDS floor (or wing.) One day she said to me about her work, "All that crackling." The advanced patients' lungs crackle as the ventilator forces their lungs to expand and contract.
New viruses tend to be more virulent than old ones. And new viruses tend to get less virulent over time -- else they die out. Ebola's incubation, transmission, morbidity, and mortality are such that it burns itself out. The common cold's are such that... it's common. Covid-19's are such that it's causing massive economic damage even if the recoveries are V-shaped. Hopefully covid-19 will get less virulent soon though.
If you order the world to stop production or trade for an indefinite period, poverty and depression is the only possible result, no matter how healthy the production and trade were before being stopped
The economy had at least two noticeable and possibly systemic issues before Covid-19. The several yield curve inversions combined with funding problems in the repo market. We certainly hope for a V-shaped recovery but there is no telling what kind of issues have been attributed to the virus that may still be there when this passes.
The only way to really get the economy going again is to deal with the virus.
The fact that it has been over a hundred years (equivalent to hundreds of millions of “lifetimes” for viruses/bacteriae) since the last pandemic of this proportion that affects humans is a clear indication that humans as hosts must not be all that valuable in terms of natural selection.
There's dozens of viruses that infect us right good and mostly don't kill the infected. They are really hard to get out of circulation, which is 'success' for a virus, it continues to exist.
Once we had the knowledge to do so, we destroyed smallpox in short order.
COVID-19, SARS, Ebola, AIDS, etc. all fit in this paradigm.
Anything that's not in that "sweet spot" is naturally selected away and quickly extinguished (MERS, SARS, Ebola, etc). We're basically breeding a bioweapon.
Not that there is any other choice though. Food for thought.
Honestly, all sorts of things are possible at the moment. The truth is we don't have enough good data to really know much of anything. And in the absence of info everyone is free to arbitrarily prognosticate. For a forum that's generally pro-data it's somewhat disappointing to see it here.