Maybe the "worth listening to" caveat is intending to dismiss those, but I certainly don't think it's the case that nobody is suggesting it or that it's not worth pushing back against.
When I first posted this, all 4 top-level comments were dead, and half of them suggested that this Ebola outbreak would be similar to COVID-19. I agree that they're probably not worth listening to, but I still think that it's worth refuting them, since the media is generally not doing a great job explaining how Ebola is different from COVID-19.
> The concern here is the very high mortality rate.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree that this is concerning, but concerning in the sense that something absolutely horrible is happening in the world, and not in the sense that I could wake up tomorrow sick with Ebola (like some other comments were implying).
This is exactly the tradeoff I described.
That is almost irrelevant.
Our immune systems, and environments are mostly security-by-obscurity.
Viruses randomly mutate to find vulnerabilities.
Their biggest issue is finding solutions using a genetic optimisation algorithm.
Their biggest strength is that it is a massively parallel search. Think of 10^x monkeys bashing at all points in their reproduction (maybe 10^18 for peak covid in human hosts).
The "monkeys" aren't trying huge numbers of variations, they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations when they fail to copy exactly.
You're ignoring unsuccessful mutations... But those are the chaos monkeys that really matter!! "on the order of 10¹⁷–10¹⁹ individual nucleotide mutations per month". In part because infectious virions are far fewer than total viral RNA copies.
Which ends up with 2-3 mutations per month in the successful lineage. That's the "rare" number you're thinking of, but mutations are extremely common (as anyone with cancer finds out).
Your "energy" point is just plain wrong. You might carry 100ug of virus when infected - a tiny proportion of your weight. Total mass of virions in humanity at peak might have been 10kg.
See "The total number and mass of SARS-CoV-2 virions" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7685332/
> ...they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations...
to which you replied:
> You're ignoring unsuccessful mutations...
You are also conflating absolute numbers with likelihoods; flipping two dozen heads in a row is a rare occurrence (1:2⁻²⁴). Saying that "if everyone on Earth tried it today we'd expect it to happen ~500 times" is not a counter argument.
You're also conflating the substitution rate (rate of mutation rate accumulation in the viral gene pool) with the frequency of copying errors (your "chaos monkeys" metaphor, to which I'm objecting).
Your objection to my statement that viral reproduction consumes resources from the host (which I shorthanded as "energy" since all cellular resources ultimately depend on this) is nonsensical. Who cares about the mass of the viruses?
That's like disputing the claim that "the vandals caused $3 million in property damage" by saying "but they only had $273.15 with them". It's completely irrelevant.