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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

We also haven’t gotten the “uncontrollable plague killing upwards of 200 million people.”

Seeing 200M as an upper bound and that the current excess deaths are around 21M from COVID, the prediction is "only" off by 1 order of magnitude. At most.

The thing is, "upward of" denotes a lower bound, not an upper bound.

Cool, "upward of" means "in excess of" rather than "up to". Thanks for the correction.

Haha I always interpreted it as the opposite of that, but this makes much more sense!

There is a plague like this every so many years, so not difficult to predict.

We’re not entirely done with this last one yet, either.

Having read Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague in the 1990s, a pandemic was the most obvious prediction possible. Only timing is the hard part. We got rather lucky that our research on SARS-CoV-1 was available in advance, along with the new development of lipids for mRNA vaccines. Without that, 1% death rate was certainly possible with COVID, if not the 2.5% predicted in the article. Which is still much better than historical pandemics like plague and smallpox in the New World.

Though, uh, maybe all that research made pandemic possible in the first place. Anyway a miss by one order of magnitude on a virus that does exponential growth is really good but obvious prediction. Public policy should definitely plan to deal with outbreaks on this scale of death.

We were lucky SARS-CoV-1 was not as contagious as SARS-CoV-2.

Or unlucky that the lab leak happened. I don’t think the virus origin is knowable either way, though.

We can't disprove that it was planted by space aliens, either. That doesn't mean it's useful, absent of evidence, to entertain that hypothesis.

Which is why I only brought up the hypotheses with a lot of evidence behind them.

I dispute that there's a lot of evidence for the "lab leak" theory.

I don’t know why we’re all saying “a miss by (just) one order of magnitude” makes it a good or close prediction. After all, a guess of 200 million deaths is just as close to “excess Covid deaths” (one order of magnitude, but in the other direction) as it is to complete human extinction

The "catch on like wildfire" part was true though. One moment you hear about it on the news, the next (the next weeks) half your family gets it - talking about Omicron in this case. Thankfully very low lethality.

Not for a lack of trying. If monkeypox really flares up I suspect people will literally hold superspreader parties just to spite the system.

Not trolling, genuine question: I saw something that said that they had found the first case of human-to-human infection of monkeypox. If it doesn't normally spread that way, how is it spreading? Or was that just the first confirmed case of what everybody knew was going on?

I don't know. I'm not a doctor I'm just another dog on the internet.

Quoting wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeypox#Causes)

Most human cases of monkeypox are acquired from an infected animal, though the route of transmission remains unknown. The virus is thought to enter the body through broken skin, the respiratory tract, or the mucous membranes of the eyes, nose, or mouth. Once a human is infected, transmission to other humans is common, with family members and hospital staff at particularly high risk of infection.

> Most human cases of monkeypox are acquired from an infected animal

My money is on this no longer being true, though to the best of our knowledge, it was 6 months ago.

probably sex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_monkeypox_outbreak#Outbre...

I don't think so. Monkeypox can get pretty nasty/dirty and you can be left with scars for life. In don't think people will definitely get it. Especially because it's actually possible to avoid it unlike covid which we'll all get sooner or later (and more than once in most cases)

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