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“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinctio

“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a scary thought.

redisman 5y ago
Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
- andylei 5y ago
  > nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later
  - redisman 5y ago
    Thanks- the site is getting a death hug so I can’t read the whole article
- ErikAugust 5y ago
  “…be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later.” That wasn’t possible in the 90s.
- wk_end 5y ago
  The claim seems to be that it's because we're "able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days [...] or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later". The latter certainly wasn't needed for SARS1, but the former...? At the time I was a high school student in Toronto, which was hit relatively hard by SARS1, and I remember there was lots of fear and anxiety around it, but it didn't affect my daily life in any way. Did we do lots of PCR testing and quarantining to keep it from spreading? Not sure. That wouldn't have been possible a few decades ago, anyway.
- JamisonM 5y ago
  It is nonsensical but not because of the way the viruses evolved - if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event! With SARS1 we actually managed to make a vaccine - we just didn't end up needing it.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event! That depends quite a bit on how rapidly it spreads. If COVID had started with Omicron's level of infectiousness, it'd have been a dramatically more deadly pandemic.
    - JamisonM 5y ago
      Agreed, but then the response to its infectiousness would have been different as well! And even Omicron wouldn't rise to anything close to an extinction event, it is like the opposite of MERS, way better at transmission, relatively bad at killing. If the first wave of SARS-Cov-2 was Omicron we'd have seen a worse 1st wave on net, but a far higher survival rate, more population immunity pre-vaccine.. and part of me thinks that the response would have been better, the original SARS-Cov-2 hit a bit of a sweet-spot in terms of political accountability with respect to how slowly it moved across the world and the gradual build up of hospital crisis in most places (1st wave hot-spots excepted of course).
- ccbccccbbcccbb 5y ago
  Absolutely it is. But there really is a difference the past decade (I'd say two) made. It is the quantity and quality of psychological manipulation. What happened to Germans in 1930s won't repeat again, people are more knowledgeable and less susceptible to mass hypnosis in the 21st century, right? And bang, all of a sudden there is a menace which didn't exist before. By mere redefinition of what a menace is.
- wk_end 5y ago
  One other thing to note - our ability to lockdown and maintain a functional society was contingent on the ability for enough (privileged) people to work from home that the internet has now afforded us. A few decades ago our world looked and worked very differently, and the pandemic response would have differed accordingly; if lockdowns might have actually had a direct material impact on the intelligentsia, managerial class, liberal elite, etc. or cost them their homes or their jobs, there would have been far less of a push for lockdowns. Naturally, the working class still got screwed - either you're "non-essential" and lost your job or were "essential" and ran a risk of contracting COVID that your overlords got to avoid from the comfort of their own home - but it might've helped slow the spread of the virus, some.
makomk 5y ago
The problem with that thought is that having such high fatality rates is a problem for a virus that hopes to become a pandemic - it's hard for a disease to spread silently through the population if several out of every ten people infected end up in the hospital, even with a delay, and of course pretty much all developed countries have contact tracing systems in place even if that fact got downplayed after they didn't work so well against Covid. (Which is just inherently not a good candidate for that tactic.)
- onychomys 5y ago
  > is that having such high fatality rates is a problem for a virus that hopes to become a pandemic Somebody forgot to tell that to smallpox, which had something like a 25 or 30% IFR before vaccines came around. And there were lots and lots of pandemics of that!
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    People got sufficiently tired of deadly smallpox outbreaks to mount vaccination campaigns, eventually we managed to vaccinate enough of the globe to make the virus extinct.
    - p_l 5y ago
      It still took pissed off communists with an axe to grind after getting hit with at least two smallpox epidemics to propose and support an eradication campaign.
- vkou 5y ago
  That depends on how long it takes you between the moment when you are contagious, and the moment that you drop dead. If you are contagious on day 2, symptomatic on day 17, and drop dead on day 180, such a disease will happily spread through a population, despite having a 100% fatality rate. There will be no evolutionary pressure for that virus to become less lethal, just like how there's no evolutionary pressure for people to live to 200.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
The extinction part is hyperbole though - with 7 billion humans out there it would need to hit fatality rates of 99.9...% for a decent chance of the human species to be completely wiped out. And also assuming that it would persist and/or spread well enough to also wipe out the various uncontacted tribes on 2-3 continents.
- SECProto 5y ago
  Modern society functions by virtue of a century of businesses cutting margins as thin as possible, trading supply chain fragility for lower labour and capital costs. We're already seeing wild economic issues from a much lower fatality rate disease and the labour shortages/supply chain blockages/etc it has caused. It's very easy to imagine a 30% fatality rate pandemic causing total worldwide economic collapse, causing famine, causing nuclear war, causing photosynthesis to fail, causing a mass extinction exceeding the P-T event. Whether human populations survived is (to be honest), a kind of irrelevant nitpick. The species as a whole was much more robust when large fractions of the population were engaged in subsistence farming and we hadn't disbalanced the atmosphere and doomsday weapons didn't exist. Edit: minor grammar correction
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    I guess that I still consider global nuclear suicide-"war" to be very unlikely even (especially ?) under these conditions, but it certainly changes the calculus if you don't think the same way.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  A lot of this was hyperbolic: > But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows. Chickenpox is nowhere near that deadly. Remember the "Simpsons" episode where Maggie gets the chickenpox and Homer hosts a pox party?
- trinovantes 5y ago
  At that fatality rate, the virus would probably struggle to spread as its carriers would all die first. The sweet spot is probably around 40-50% like the bubonic plague
barry-cotter 5y ago
Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the space of a hundred years. Civilization can survive an awful lot of people dying and even if COVID had a 2% fatality rate it would roll on more or less without a blip. The Spanish flu didn't lead to the fall of civilization anywhere and it killed a lot more people in the prime of their life. COVID deaths are highly concrentrated in the over 50s. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu
- zapataband1 5y ago
  If a virus infects more people it has more of a chance of spreading and more of a chance of mutating into a deadlier virus that affects a different demographic. Bringing sweden up but not the vast number of countries or active measure still currently in place, including mass vaccinations, seems to serve a narrow narritive. Bringing up civilizations and cultures that did in-fact get destroyed by viruses doesn't really help your argument.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    The Inca didn't even have the concept of infectious disease, or quarantine. If you want a 99.9th percentile bad outcome look at Black Death Norway. Civilization didn't collapse in the face of 60% of the population dying. These are people without the germ theory of disease, never mind antibiotics, antivirals and the state capacity to seal borders completely and modern hospitals. COVID can be really, really bad without it ever having been likely to be a civilizational or species level threat.
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      In medieval Norway most individual settlements were almost totally self-reliant. Some could go for years without any interaction with outsiders and such interaction as they had was mostly about things not essential to survival. (Probably the same is true for the Incan empire.) Things are different now, yes.
ansible 5y ago
I view COVID-19 as relatively uniquely able to become a global pandemic. 1. Delayed onset of symptoms. That you can spread the disease for a couple days before you first have symptoms has caused so much spreading. If, instead, people were showing symptoms within 12 hours, they'd be much more likely to not be out and about the next day spreading the disease. 2. Wide range of symptoms. Some people felt nearly nothing. Others dealt with it like a minor cold. And others it killed, but not a high enough percentage for most people to take it seriously enough. "Oh, even if I get it, it won't be that big a deal..." kind of thinking. If everyone got at least a "worse than the flu" like reaction to it, everyone would have been taking it more seriously.
- marvin 5y ago
  "Kills only 0.2%" (as long as healthcare is available) is a killer feature, so to speak. It hits right where it's bad enough to cause serious damage, while being subtle enough that you need some analytical thinking to understand the consequences until it's everywhere at once. There would be almost no antivaxxer sentiment if it killed 20%, because everyone in an area with an outbreak would know someone who died, likely even have seen them sick.
helloworld11 5y ago
>SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. Just blatantly untrue and easily verifiable as such. The IFR of the virus behind COVID-19 is maybe 0.4%, and even this varies a bit based on demographics. 1% is an exaggeration that I wouldn't expect from an obviously intelligent individual like Stross, 4% is just way out in left field as far as misstating the basic facts goes. I generally detest the highly politicized phrase "misinformation", but percentages like these almost give it legitimacy in the context of debate about COVID.

redisman 5y ago

Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”

andylei 5y ago
> nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later
- redisman 5y ago
  Thanks- the site is getting a death hug so I can’t read the whole article
ErikAugust 5y ago
“…be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later.” That wasn’t possible in the 90s.
wk_end 5y ago
The claim seems to be that it's because we're "able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days [...] or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later". The latter certainly wasn't needed for SARS1, but the former...? At the time I was a high school student in Toronto, which was hit relatively hard by SARS1, and I remember there was lots of fear and anxiety around it, but it didn't affect my daily life in any way. Did we do lots of PCR testing and quarantining to keep it from spreading? Not sure. That wouldn't have been possible a few decades ago, anyway.
JamisonM 5y ago
It is nonsensical but not because of the way the viruses evolved - if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event! With SARS1 we actually managed to make a vaccine - we just didn't end up needing it.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event! That depends quite a bit on how rapidly it spreads. If COVID had started with Omicron's level of infectiousness, it'd have been a dramatically more deadly pandemic.
  - JamisonM 5y ago
    Agreed, but then the response to its infectiousness would have been different as well! And even Omicron wouldn't rise to anything close to an extinction event, it is like the opposite of MERS, way better at transmission, relatively bad at killing. If the first wave of SARS-Cov-2 was Omicron we'd have seen a worse 1st wave on net, but a far higher survival rate, more population immunity pre-vaccine.. and part of me thinks that the response would have been better, the original SARS-Cov-2 hit a bit of a sweet-spot in terms of political accountability with respect to how slowly it moved across the world and the gradual build up of hospital crisis in most places (1st wave hot-spots excepted of course).
ccbccccbbcccbb 5y ago
Absolutely it is. But there really is a difference the past decade (I'd say two) made. It is the quantity and quality of psychological manipulation. What happened to Germans in 1930s won't repeat again, people are more knowledgeable and less susceptible to mass hypnosis in the 21st century, right? And bang, all of a sudden there is a menace which didn't exist before. By mere redefinition of what a menace is.
wk_end 5y ago
One other thing to note - our ability to lockdown and maintain a functional society was contingent on the ability for enough (privileged) people to work from home that the internet has now afforded us. A few decades ago our world looked and worked very differently, and the pandemic response would have differed accordingly; if lockdowns might have actually had a direct material impact on the intelligentsia, managerial class, liberal elite, etc. or cost them their homes or their jobs, there would have been far less of a push for lockdowns. Naturally, the working class still got screwed - either you're "non-essential" and lost your job or were "essential" and ran a risk of contracting COVID that your overlords got to avoid from the comfort of their own home - but it might've helped slow the spread of the virus, some.

makomk 5y ago

The problem with that thought is that having such high fatality rates is a problem for a virus that hopes to become a pandemic - it's hard for a disease to spread silently through the population if several out of every ten people infected end up in the hospital, even with a delay, and of course pretty much all developed countries have contact tracing systems in place even if that fact got downplayed after they didn't work so well against Covid. (Which is just inherently not a good candidate for that tactic.)

onychomys 5y ago
> is that having such high fatality rates is a problem for a virus that hopes to become a pandemic Somebody forgot to tell that to smallpox, which had something like a 25 or 30% IFR before vaccines came around. And there were lots and lots of pandemics of that!
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  People got sufficiently tired of deadly smallpox outbreaks to mount vaccination campaigns, eventually we managed to vaccinate enough of the globe to make the virus extinct.
  - p_l 5y ago
    It still took pissed off communists with an axe to grind after getting hit with at least two smallpox epidemics to propose and support an eradication campaign.
vkou 5y ago
That depends on how long it takes you between the moment when you are contagious, and the moment that you drop dead. If you are contagious on day 2, symptomatic on day 17, and drop dead on day 180, such a disease will happily spread through a population, despite having a 100% fatality rate. There will be no evolutionary pressure for that virus to become less lethal, just like how there's no evolutionary pressure for people to live to 200.

BlueTemplar 5y ago

The extinction part is hyperbole though - with 7 billion humans out there it would need to hit fatality rates of 99.9...% for a decent chance of the human species to be completely wiped out. And also assuming that it would persist and/or spread well enough to also wipe out the various uncontacted tribes on 2-3 continents.

SECProto 5y ago
Modern society functions by virtue of a century of businesses cutting margins as thin as possible, trading supply chain fragility for lower labour and capital costs. We're already seeing wild economic issues from a much lower fatality rate disease and the labour shortages/supply chain blockages/etc it has caused. It's very easy to imagine a 30% fatality rate pandemic causing total worldwide economic collapse, causing famine, causing nuclear war, causing photosynthesis to fail, causing a mass extinction exceeding the P-T event. Whether human populations survived is (to be honest), a kind of irrelevant nitpick. The species as a whole was much more robust when large fractions of the population were engaged in subsistence farming and we hadn't disbalanced the atmosphere and doomsday weapons didn't exist. Edit: minor grammar correction
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  I guess that I still consider global nuclear suicide-"war" to be very unlikely even (especially ?) under these conditions, but it certainly changes the calculus if you don't think the same way.
dehrmann 5y ago
A lot of this was hyperbolic: > But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows. Chickenpox is nowhere near that deadly. Remember the "Simpsons" episode where Maggie gets the chickenpox and Homer hosts a pox party?
trinovantes 5y ago
At that fatality rate, the virus would probably struggle to spread as its carriers would all die first. The sweet spot is probably around 40-50% like the bubonic plague

barry-cotter 5y ago

Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the space of a hundred years. Civilization can survive an awful lot of people dying and even if COVID had a 2% fatality rate it would roll on more or less without a blip. The Spanish flu didn't lead to the fall of civilization anywhere and it killed a lot more people in the prime of their life. COVID deaths are highly concrentrated in the over 50s. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu

zapataband1 5y ago
If a virus infects more people it has more of a chance of spreading and more of a chance of mutating into a deadlier virus that affects a different demographic. Bringing sweden up but not the vast number of countries or active measure still currently in place, including mass vaccinations, seems to serve a narrow narritive. Bringing up civilizations and cultures that did in-fact get destroyed by viruses doesn't really help your argument.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  The Inca didn't even have the concept of infectious disease, or quarantine. If you want a 99.9th percentile bad outcome look at Black Death Norway. Civilization didn't collapse in the face of 60% of the population dying. These are people without the germ theory of disease, never mind antibiotics, antivirals and the state capacity to seal borders completely and modern hospitals. COVID can be really, really bad without it ever having been likely to be a civilizational or species level threat.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    In medieval Norway most individual settlements were almost totally self-reliant. Some could go for years without any interaction with outsiders and such interaction as they had was mostly about things not essential to survival. (Probably the same is true for the Incan empire.) Things are different now, yes.

ansible 5y ago

I view COVID-19 as relatively uniquely able to become a global pandemic. 1. Delayed onset of symptoms. That you can spread the disease for a couple days before you first have symptoms has caused so much spreading. If, instead, people were showing symptoms within 12 hours, they'd be much more likely to not be out and about the next day spreading the disease. 2. Wide range of symptoms. Some people felt nearly nothing. Others dealt with it like a minor cold. And others it killed, but not a high enough percentage for most people to take it seriously enough. "Oh, even if I get it, it won't be that big a deal..." kind of thinking. If everyone got at least a "worse than the flu" like reaction to it, everyone would have been taking it more seriously.

marvin 5y ago
"Kills only 0.2%" (as long as healthcare is available) is a killer feature, so to speak. It hits right where it's bad enough to cause serious damage, while being subtle enough that you need some analytical thinking to understand the consequences until it's everywhere at once. There would be almost no antivaxxer sentiment if it killed 20%, because everyone in an area with an outbreak would know someone who died, likely even have seen them sick.

helloworld11 5y ago

>SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. Just blatantly untrue and easily verifiable as such. The IFR of the virus behind COVID-19 is maybe 0.4%, and even this varies a bit based on demographics. 1% is an exaggeration that I wouldn't expect from an obviously intelligent individual like Stross, 4% is just way out in left field as far as misstating the basic facts goes. I generally detest the highly politicized phrase "misinformation", but percentages like these almost give it legitimacy in the context of debate about COVID.