4 ms·

Smallpox is roughly as contagious as SARS-Cov2 Delta and therefore more transmossible than the original variant. However those numbers are the unmitigated numb

Smallpox is roughly as contagious as SARS-Cov2 Delta and therefore more transmossible than the original variant. However those numbers are the unmitigated numbers. Public health and other authority figures have some advantages in fighting smallpox versus SARS-Cov2. IIRC, smallpox is not infectious until the "pox" are visible on the body, greatly improving ability to screen for the disease and the vaccine traditional used creates a small but visible scar, again aiding screening. The world also maintains a significant (300M doses vaccine stockpile in the US as well as other countries) with already approved vaccines that can begin manufacturering immediately. Finally, smallpox is so deadly and obviously horrific that it "should" help public health officials get past vaccine and other mitigation "hesitantcy". A smallpox pandemic would truly be devastating and much worse then Covid19, but thankful there is reason to believe outbreaks could be controlled before pandemic status was reached. One of my biggest worries coming out of Covid19 is how epidemiological public health has become tied up in political identity and that the next pandemic will see significant portions of the population actively resisting outbreak control measures.

lazide 5y ago
Based on what I’ve been able to find, Delta would have a ‘raw’ (without extensive countermeasures) R0 of 12-13 (original Covid was measured in NYC pre-masking and lockdowns at 6.4). Do you have cites for the other numbers you have? Totally agree on severity (or lack thereof) being why it is spreading and thriving. Also the high asymptomatic spread helps too. You can’t get the consistent, strong response in taking countermeasures you’d get from something more visibly horrific like Ebola. Though there have been many cases in Africa of someone sneaking in to loot a ‘dead’ village or graveyard and starting a new outbreak when they get home. So apparently even almost certainly dying a horrible death while bleeding from every opening isn’t enough to get everyone to take it seriously.
- topkai22 5y ago
  A December 2020 journal article I was using (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/) gave an r0 range of the original of 1.5-6.68 across various studies. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/ puts Delta at about 5.08 and the origin strain at around 2.79. There is a lot of range in numbers I've seen, but the proportion is generally agreed to be about 2X for Delta to the origin strain. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11742399 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11742399 has smallpox between 3.5 to 6, so closer to Delta than the origin strain. I didn't look into these numbers to deeply as they seemed to be under active debate and my point was that smallpox is in the range of Delta, not the specific number.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
With smallpox so deadly, how did europeans intentionally put it on blankets given to native americans with genocidal intent? were europeans conferred some residual resistance by variants being endemic across europe, but not the americas?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > With smallpox so deadly, how did europeans intentionally put it on blankets given to native americans with genocidal intent? That's a myth, stemming from Howard Zinn. Zinn basically scoured various underground and left-wing pamphlets, some even anti-american cold war propaganda, and collected that all into an underground history, called "A People's History of the United States". It's wildly popular among a certain subset of the population, who take what's written there as gospel. Zinn never provided a source for the small-pox blanket trope. Not because he invented it (I don't think he did) but because citing propaganda is not a good look for a historian. When you try to do some archeological digging of these urban legends, the closest thing you can find in terms of real history is a letter from colonial times when there was a mention of this as a possible war strategy by a British administrator, Sir Jeffery Amherst, but there is no evidence anything like this actually happened during the British rule or after independence. By the time it reached Zinn, it was turned in US cavalry officers actually giving blankets to Indians in the 19th Century. From then it spun out into popular culture. I think it's even included in the Simpsons.
  - IAmWorried 5y ago
    I had to read Zinn for AP US History in 10th grade, and I fucking hated that shit. The guy would somehow always find a way to spin everything this country did in a negative way. Glad to hear that at least part of it was bullshit.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      I'm sorry you had to read that in high school. This kind of stuff is why you see parent revolts. The problems with polemicists like Zinn or Chomsky is that they go looking for any evidence to support their thesis (namely that America is an evil empire committing atrocities around the globe), which makes for very bad history. I mean, I could mine Swiss newspapers, interviews, selectively quote from some policy papers, and make it look like Switzerland is some violent third world hell-hole if I had enough time and a strong enough obsession to prove my point. But that's not history, because it doesn't tell you the big picture or the main facts, instead it focuses on things that either didn't happen at all, or were exceptional. People who read that stuff come away with a truly warped view of the world, and then this penetrates into popular sites even like wikipedia. For example, the "US Overthrow" of Iranian Mossadeq or the 1973 Pinochet coup are completely misrepresented, whereas things like US involvement in supporting Algerian rebels and African left-wing rebels is erased. So you don't get an understanding of US policy or the factors driving it, which are not easily reducible to soundbytes or simple analyses. Similarly the anti-communist military action by the Dutch in Indonesia after WW2, the Korean War (Chomsky claims it was the US that was the aggressor), and even key facts about the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge are massively distorted. This results in students having holes where huge parts of history are entirely missing, and have been replaced with hate, and a lot of people emerge from that scene very angry and militant, both at the U.S. and more recently at Europeans in general, which I guess is the whole point of teaching this stuff - to create angry, radicalized, students. I hope you escaped that trap.

lazide 5y ago

Based on what I’ve been able to find, Delta would have a ‘raw’ (without extensive countermeasures) R0 of 12-13 (original Covid was measured in NYC pre-masking and lockdowns at 6.4). Do you have cites for the other numbers you have? Totally agree on severity (or lack thereof) being why it is spreading and thriving. Also the high asymptomatic spread helps too. You can’t get the consistent, strong response in taking countermeasures you’d get from something more visibly horrific like Ebola. Though there have been many cases in Africa of someone sneaking in to loot a ‘dead’ village or graveyard and starting a new outbreak when they get home. So apparently even almost certainly dying a horrible death while bleeding from every opening isn’t enough to get everyone to take it seriously.

topkai22 5y ago
A December 2020 journal article I was using (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/) gave an r0 range of the original of 1.5-6.68 across various studies. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/ puts Delta at about 5.08 and the origin strain at around 2.79. There is a lot of range in numbers I've seen, but the proportion is generally agreed to be about 2X for Delta to the origin strain. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11742399 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11742399 has smallpox between 3.5 to 6, so closer to Delta than the origin strain. I didn't look into these numbers to deeply as they seemed to be under active debate and my point was that smallpox is in the range of Delta, not the specific number.

jjtheblunt 5y ago

With smallpox so deadly, how did europeans intentionally put it on blankets given to native americans with genocidal intent? were europeans conferred some residual resistance by variants being endemic across europe, but not the americas?

rsj_hn 5y ago
> With smallpox so deadly, how did europeans intentionally put it on blankets given to native americans with genocidal intent? That's a myth, stemming from Howard Zinn. Zinn basically scoured various underground and left-wing pamphlets, some even anti-american cold war propaganda, and collected that all into an underground history, called "A People's History of the United States". It's wildly popular among a certain subset of the population, who take what's written there as gospel. Zinn never provided a source for the small-pox blanket trope. Not because he invented it (I don't think he did) but because citing propaganda is not a good look for a historian. When you try to do some archeological digging of these urban legends, the closest thing you can find in terms of real history is a letter from colonial times when there was a mention of this as a possible war strategy by a British administrator, Sir Jeffery Amherst, but there is no evidence anything like this actually happened during the British rule or after independence. By the time it reached Zinn, it was turned in US cavalry officers actually giving blankets to Indians in the 19th Century. From then it spun out into popular culture. I think it's even included in the Simpsons.
- IAmWorried 5y ago
  I had to read Zinn for AP US History in 10th grade, and I fucking hated that shit. The guy would somehow always find a way to spin everything this country did in a negative way. Glad to hear that at least part of it was bullshit.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    I'm sorry you had to read that in high school. This kind of stuff is why you see parent revolts. The problems with polemicists like Zinn or Chomsky is that they go looking for any evidence to support their thesis (namely that America is an evil empire committing atrocities around the globe), which makes for very bad history. I mean, I could mine Swiss newspapers, interviews, selectively quote from some policy papers, and make it look like Switzerland is some violent third world hell-hole if I had enough time and a strong enough obsession to prove my point. But that's not history, because it doesn't tell you the big picture or the main facts, instead it focuses on things that either didn't happen at all, or were exceptional. People who read that stuff come away with a truly warped view of the world, and then this penetrates into popular sites even like wikipedia. For example, the "US Overthrow" of Iranian Mossadeq or the 1973 Pinochet coup are completely misrepresented, whereas things like US involvement in supporting Algerian rebels and African left-wing rebels is erased. So you don't get an understanding of US policy or the factors driving it, which are not easily reducible to soundbytes or simple analyses. Similarly the anti-communist military action by the Dutch in Indonesia after WW2, the Korean War (Chomsky claims it was the US that was the aggressor), and even key facts about the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge are massively distorted. This results in students having holes where huge parts of history are entirely missing, and have been replaced with hate, and a lot of people emerge from that scene very angry and militant, both at the U.S. and more recently at Europeans in general, which I guess is the whole point of teaching this stuff - to create angry, radicalized, students. I hope you escaped that trap.