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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 spre
by 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 agoPeople 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 agoIt 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 agoThat 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.