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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

The long distance travel which spreads a pandemic so fast now is predominantly a First World thing. We could and should have shut that down.

A month after we knew we were in deep trouble it was still perfectly normal to decide hey this is boring I'll go on vacation to somewhere with nowhere near the capacity needed to handle COVID-19. Oh, I have a little cough, never mind if I feel sick I'll just fly home after I'm done infecting these people.

Remember this is SARS-CoV-2. Where's the mutations and endless new strains of SARS-CoV-1? There aren't any, it was eliminated in humans.

So yes it is now sadly likely we're stuck with this, but we ought to be clear it's our fault in countries that didn't do even one tenth of what they should to prevent it.

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>Remember this is SARS-CoV-2. Where's the mutations and endless new strains of SARS-CoV-1? There aren't any, it was eliminated in humans.

I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world. They had an excellent pandemic response and quashed it before it reached other countries.

This time around it had spread around the world before we even heard about it. It was completely predictable containment efforts would be futile.

sars definitely reached other countries outside of china..

> I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world

Is this true? According to the CDC, there were SARS cases reported in Europe and the Americas prior to containment in China. Why was it different this time around?

SARS was more lethal and people actually took public health measures seriously.

Additionally, SARS v1 was not contagious until there were visible symptoms - a huge difference from COVID/SARS v2.

I wouldn't put too much confidence in that. SARS wasn't known to be contagious presymptomatically, but neither was COVID-19 for many months. Levels of presymptomatic transmission similar to COVID-19 are entirely consistent with the evidence we have from SARS.

That seems unlikely, if for no other reason than the way COVID has spread. Do you have any data?

All the data I've seen on SARs and the mechanisms deployed to control it indicate infectivity at or only very, very shortly before clear symptoms or they would not have been able to control it.

COVID is quite clearly infectious before visible symptoms of any kind, and even when visible many times symptoms are pretty mild - where SARs was not - and this matches it's observed spread and difficulty in controlling it.

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