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A pandemic flu really wouldnt be something we could cope with. The combination of a long contagious latent period and high R0 would be devastating, and we need

A pandemic flu really wouldnt be something we could cope with. The combination of a long contagious latent period and high R0 would be devastating, and we need to bat perfectly every time to stop it. Sure, we can stop things like MERS and SARS and H1N1, but it just takes one slipping through and our knowledge won’t matter. Besides, we literally can stop things like measles, but people are too stupid and superstitious! It’s easy to look back on people who believed in the miasma theory of contagion, and laugh, but we haven’t come so far. We know our abuse of antibiotics is going to come home to roost, and we do very little to stop it. We know that cutting further into unspoiled habitats raises the risk of discovering something our immune systems have never encountered, but we do it. A black swan event like 1918 would play out just the same today as any other time.

lisper 8y ago
The 1918 flu killed 20-50 million people out of a population at the time of 1.8 billion, i.e. somewhere between 1 and 2.7%. That is not even in the same ballpark as the black death, which killed a third of the people in Europe and more in other parts of the world. Even a worst case scenario today is extremely unlikely to be that devastating.
- gotocake 8y ago
  And yet the 1918 flu had profound effects, and there is no guarantee that any future pandemic wouldn’t have a much higher CFR and total mortality. We also have to consider the impact of societal collapse in the near term, and the deaths that would cause. It’s true that the Black Death was spectacularly deveststing, but it’s also true that in a world where regular shipments of food and medicine are critical to daily survival, the diseases themselves would probably be secondary to starvation and societal collapse. Very very few people in the developed world could support themselves without the context of a functioning state for very long. It’s also true that we’re armed to the teeth and have lots of transportation. People would fight for food, fight for medicine they were used to a steady supply of, and you’d have mass casualties from thst alone. In the true (hopefully deeply unlikely) worst cast you’d see the use of nuclear weapons. The deaths in Asia from the plague had very little impact on Europeans, and visa versa. We can’t honestly say the same today. If something like MERS mutates in the right way, we could very easily look at a similar CFR to the Black Death, in a world with more than 7 billion people in it.
- chewz 8y ago
  The comparable event to Black Death in Europe was religious wars with population loss up to 60% in Germany and Czech. We do not need plague. https://www.deviantart.com/arminius1871/art/Population-loss-in-the-30-years-war-729172832 https://www.deviantart.com/arminius1871/art/Population-loss-...
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    Deviantart is your source? Really?
    - lisper 8y ago
      To say nothing of the fact that even according to that questionable source, the highest levels of population loss happened only in very small regions. Oh, and this whole thing is a non-squitur because war is a totally different risk than an epidemic, especially since 1945.
    - gotocake 8y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War#Casualties_and_disease https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War#Casualti... The war ranks with the worst famines and plagues as the greatest medical catastrophe in modern European history.[78][79] Lacking good census information, historians have extrapolated the experience of well-studied regions.[80] John Theibault agrees with the conclusions in Günther Franz's Der Dreissigjährige Krieg und das Deutsche Volk (1940), that population losses were great but varied regionally (ranging as high as 50%) and says his estimates are the best available.[81] The war killed soldiers and civilians directly, caused famines, destroyed livelihoods, disrupted commerce, postponed marriages and childbirth, and forced large numbers of people to relocate. The overall reduction of population in the German states was typically 25% to 40%.[82] Some regions were affected much more than others.[83] For example, Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war.[84] In the region of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas, an estimated two-thirds of the population died.[85] Overall, the male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.[86] All told that DA map seems to be grounded in the best research available. It’s also a great example of how a primary shock opens the way for massive secondary casualties due to diseases and social disruption. The war itself in terms of direct casualties was dwarfed by resultant famine and epidemic diseases as a result of the primary casualties and destruction. Here’s a simple thought experiment: What happens in densely populated cities when everything from sanitation to firefighting breaks down due to primary casualties? We’re not rural 17th century Germans, so a fire is going to spread catastrophically if the people who are meant to fight it are sick or afraid to leave their families. Just like the 30 Years War, but on a far greater scale, the secondary effects would dominate.

lisper 8y ago

The 1918 flu killed 20-50 million people out of a population at the time of 1.8 billion, i.e. somewhere between 1 and 2.7%. That is not even in the same ballpark as the black death, which killed a third of the people in Europe and more in other parts of the world. Even a worst case scenario today is extremely unlikely to be that devastating.

gotocake 8y ago
And yet the 1918 flu had profound effects, and there is no guarantee that any future pandemic wouldn’t have a much higher CFR and total mortality. We also have to consider the impact of societal collapse in the near term, and the deaths that would cause. It’s true that the Black Death was spectacularly deveststing, but it’s also true that in a world where regular shipments of food and medicine are critical to daily survival, the diseases themselves would probably be secondary to starvation and societal collapse. Very very few people in the developed world could support themselves without the context of a functioning state for very long. It’s also true that we’re armed to the teeth and have lots of transportation. People would fight for food, fight for medicine they were used to a steady supply of, and you’d have mass casualties from thst alone. In the true (hopefully deeply unlikely) worst cast you’d see the use of nuclear weapons. The deaths in Asia from the plague had very little impact on Europeans, and visa versa. We can’t honestly say the same today. If something like MERS mutates in the right way, we could very easily look at a similar CFR to the Black Death, in a world with more than 7 billion people in it.
chewz 8y ago
The comparable event to Black Death in Europe was religious wars with population loss up to 60% in Germany and Czech. We do not need plague. https://www.deviantart.com/arminius1871/art/Population-loss-in-the-30-years-war-729172832 https://www.deviantart.com/arminius1871/art/Population-loss-...
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Deviantart is your source? Really?
  - lisper 8y ago
    To say nothing of the fact that even according to that questionable source, the highest levels of population loss happened only in very small regions. Oh, and this whole thing is a non-squitur because war is a totally different risk than an epidemic, especially since 1945.
  - gotocake 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War#Casualties_and_disease https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War#Casualti... The war ranks with the worst famines and plagues as the greatest medical catastrophe in modern European history.[78][79] Lacking good census information, historians have extrapolated the experience of well-studied regions.[80] John Theibault agrees with the conclusions in Günther Franz's Der Dreissigjährige Krieg und das Deutsche Volk (1940), that population losses were great but varied regionally (ranging as high as 50%) and says his estimates are the best available.[81] The war killed soldiers and civilians directly, caused famines, destroyed livelihoods, disrupted commerce, postponed marriages and childbirth, and forced large numbers of people to relocate. The overall reduction of population in the German states was typically 25% to 40%.[82] Some regions were affected much more than others.[83] For example, Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war.[84] In the region of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas, an estimated two-thirds of the population died.[85] Overall, the male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.[86] All told that DA map seems to be grounded in the best research available. It’s also a great example of how a primary shock opens the way for massive secondary casualties due to diseases and social disruption. The war itself in terms of direct casualties was dwarfed by resultant famine and epidemic diseases as a result of the primary casualties and destruction. Here’s a simple thought experiment: What happens in densely populated cities when everything from sanitation to firefighting breaks down due to primary casualties? We’re not rural 17th century Germans, so a fire is going to spread catastrophically if the people who are meant to fight it are sick or afraid to leave their families. Just like the 30 Years War, but on a far greater scale, the secondary effects would dominate.