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Given the 'hundred year crisis', I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view... Covid was essentially "Sars II". If Sars1 had ha

Given the 'hundred year crisis', I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view... Covid was essentially "Sars II". If Sars1 had had the qualities needed to be a world wide epidemic, we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Sars1 happened a decade ago. Calling this a "hundred year crisis" seems wholly disingenuous. This event was forecast by quite a few people, the world was terribly unprepared and there's every reason to think the same factors that created this virus will create others much sooner than a hundred years from now.

greendesk 5y ago
I have a tidbit on the following: >> we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. For Sars 1 to spread widely, it has to be less deadly. There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. But just a tidbit on this statement.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. That leaves out the whole question of incubation time. The scary thing about COVID is that it gives you several days to a week or more to walk around spreading the infection before you even know you have it. That's why the reaction in the public health sector was so dramatic. It was the sort of thing that could have easily been much worse than it has turned out to be. And it's still only one or two mutations away from living up to the worst-case fears: a seriously-deadly virus that spreads all over the world before anyone knows what's happening. One that large sectors of the population have already been preconditioned to deprecate or ignore.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. That's a fine rule of thumb but not something to literally bet your life on. When smallpox was introduced to North America, it wiped out a substantial percentage of the population of the continent (This [1] claims 90%, which might be much but it was a lot). [1] https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html
makomk 5y ago
The original SARS didn't have the qualities needed to be a world-wide pandemic, though, and one of the big obstacles to that was that it was just too deadly. Not only do people who are so sick they have to be hospitalized not go out and socialize and spread the disease, all the hospitalizations and deaths gives a whole bunch of really obvious starting points for contact tracers - instead of only knowing about a tiny fraction of cases, most of them are highly visible and those people's contacts can be tracked down and isolated before they become infectious. Also, a lot of governments did take suitable precautions in case Covid was more like the original SARS early on and just got flak for it. This was particularly visible here in the UK, where Public Health England and the government had already planned for another SARS or MERS-like virus and introduced really aggressive testing and contact tracing early on in case this was it. They just got attacked in the press for not continuing that once it became clear this wasn't like SARS and it wouldn't work - and then once they gave in and reintroduced testing and contact tracing as a measure, they were attacked again because (predicatably) it wasn't that effective and the media fuelled endless badly-informed conspiracy theories about the testing and contact tracing program only existing to funnel money to their pals.
- rand49an 5y ago
  The UK test and trace program cost £37 billion, which was handed solely over to a company that has a long history of delivering projects poorly. By all good measures it wasn't effective in tracking COVID or preventing cases. In my opinion the government were rightly attacked over this issue.
  - makomk 5y ago
    See, this is what I mean about there being a lot of misinformation out there. That £37 billion wasn't handed solely over to any one company - political opponents of the current government kept on falsely claiming that it was all given to Serco, but in reality only a small fraction of the Test and Trace spending went to them: https://fullfact.org/health/test-trace-march-2021/ https://fullfact.org/health/test-trace-march-2021/ (I think most of the money that went to Serco was ultimately spent on employing the numerous call center staff required to actually scale up manual contact tracing too.)

greendesk 5y ago

I have a tidbit on the following: >> we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. For Sars 1 to spread widely, it has to be less deadly. There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. But just a tidbit on this statement.

CamperBob2 5y ago
There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. That leaves out the whole question of incubation time. The scary thing about COVID is that it gives you several days to a week or more to walk around spreading the infection before you even know you have it. That's why the reaction in the public health sector was so dramatic. It was the sort of thing that could have easily been much worse than it has turned out to be. And it's still only one or two mutations away from living up to the worst-case fears: a seriously-deadly virus that spreads all over the world before anyone knows what's happening. One that large sectors of the population have already been preconditioned to deprecate or ignore.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. That's a fine rule of thumb but not something to literally bet your life on. When smallpox was introduced to North America, it wiped out a substantial percentage of the population of the continent (This [1] claims 90%, which might be much but it was a lot). [1] https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html

makomk 5y ago

The original SARS didn't have the qualities needed to be a world-wide pandemic, though, and one of the big obstacles to that was that it was just too deadly. Not only do people who are so sick they have to be hospitalized not go out and socialize and spread the disease, all the hospitalizations and deaths gives a whole bunch of really obvious starting points for contact tracers - instead of only knowing about a tiny fraction of cases, most of them are highly visible and those people's contacts can be tracked down and isolated before they become infectious. Also, a lot of governments did take suitable precautions in case Covid was more like the original SARS early on and just got flak for it. This was particularly visible here in the UK, where Public Health England and the government had already planned for another SARS or MERS-like virus and introduced really aggressive testing and contact tracing early on in case this was it. They just got attacked in the press for not continuing that once it became clear this wasn't like SARS and it wouldn't work - and then once they gave in and reintroduced testing and contact tracing as a measure, they were attacked again because (predicatably) it wasn't that effective and the media fuelled endless badly-informed conspiracy theories about the testing and contact tracing program only existing to funnel money to their pals.

rand49an 5y ago
The UK test and trace program cost £37 billion, which was handed solely over to a company that has a long history of delivering projects poorly. By all good measures it wasn't effective in tracking COVID or preventing cases. In my opinion the government were rightly attacked over this issue.
- makomk 5y ago
  See, this is what I mean about there being a lot of misinformation out there. That £37 billion wasn't handed solely over to any one company - political opponents of the current government kept on falsely claiming that it was all given to Serco, but in reality only a small fraction of the Test and Trace spending went to them: https://fullfact.org/health/test-trace-march-2021/ https://fullfact.org/health/test-trace-march-2021/ (I think most of the money that went to Serco was ultimately spent on employing the numerous call center staff required to actually scale up manual contact tracing too.)