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Yea it is a big deal because if it was a lab leak it shows you how powerful potential bio weaponry really is. COVID has 0.1% death rate imagine if it was 10% de

• Tarq0n 5y ago
  Diseases with higher death rates spread less fast. You can't just imagine a disease with one characteristic changed, because that would completely alter it's epidemiological characteristics.
  • jfengel 5y ago
    It's true that you can't really run with the counterfactuals very easily, but it is entirely possible to have a high death rate and fast spread. HIV is basically 100% deadly. It's not exactly easy to spread, since it requires super-close contact, but that kind of super-close contact is very common. What is slow is its rate of killing you, so that you can be infectious for a long time while not having obvious symptoms. As you say, changes to any of those comes with a complete change in the epidemiology. It's hard to extrapolate.
• ModernMech 5y ago
  If COVID had a 10% death rate we wouldn’t have a whole group of people insisting it’s no worse than the flu while spreading it around. I think we have to change our ideas along what the real danger of a bio weapon is — it’s not casualties, but the ability to cripple an economy through taking down important infrastructure (hospitals, manufacturing, etc). If your super bio weapon kills 500k people in one month, everyone stays inside and it dies out. If it kills 500k people over a year, people refuse to stay inside and spread it around.