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> there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort? Basically a third of our country didn't go through tha

by coryrc 4y ago

> there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort? Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.

Grim-444 4y ago
This is a weird argument to make. The rational thing is to make different decisions in different scenarios. The choices I would make for how/whether to participate in society, whether to take a vaccine, etc., would vary greatly depending on whether a given disease has a 1 in 50,000 chance of killing me vs if it's like something out of the movie Contagion that would have a 1 in 10 chance of killing me. If covid had a 1 in 10 chance of killing me I would have made very different decisions over the course of the pandemic. You're saying that people would still behave the same as they did during covid no matter how deadly a given disease is, which seems pretty ridiculous.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cableshaft 4y ago
My state took it just seriously enough to get us to vaccines (and even before that, buy some time until they realized they shouldn't just put everyone on a respirator). For all I know it may have saved my life and the life of several other people I know with comorbidities. Possibly my parents as well. Yes, a third of the country didn't go through the effort and a lot of people died in those states also. The country might still be functioning, but not necessarily well, with significant labor shortages, supply chain issues, high inflation, a looming recession, record high gas prices, etc. (not all of that is directly because of the pandemic, granted, but it sure didn't help).
- coryrc 4y ago
  I think we're in violent agreement.
kaba0 4y ago
The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  > The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms. The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect the spread. Ebola fails to spread, not because it's deadly, but because the symptoms are almost immediate and dramatic. (I took graduate level course in the mathematics of epidemiology and got an A, which makes me no expert at all, but this is fairly fundamental.)
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    I gave the OP another example of a deadly and yet widespread virus, HIV. He is not completely off the ball, though. Our immune systems are rather good, so (with significant exceptions like HIV) if some virus doesn't kill us quickly, we tend to clear it out of the organism or at least get it under control, so it won't kill us at all. Viruses that are very deadly but take a long time to kill you (thus enhancing the risk of transmission), like HIV, aren't very typical.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  A counterexample: HIV is pretty deadly, but slow to progress, so it infected a lot of people. In countries with insufficient healthcare infrastructure (Subsaharan Africa), it actually killed a significant percentage of the population, precisely because it was so successful in spreading. Without modern medicine, it could have wiped out entire cultures, especially those that were more sex-positive. (An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)

by coryrc 4y ago

Grim-444 4y ago

This is a weird argument to make. The rational thing is to make different decisions in different scenarios. The choices I would make for how/whether to participate in society, whether to take a vaccine, etc., would vary greatly depending on whether a given disease has a 1 in 50,000 chance of killing me vs if it's like something out of the movie Contagion that would have a 1 in 10 chance of killing me. If covid had a 1 in 10 chance of killing me I would have made very different decisions over the course of the pandemic. You're saying that people would still behave the same as they did during covid no matter how deadly a given disease is, which seems pretty ridiculous.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cableshaft 4y ago

My state took it just seriously enough to get us to vaccines (and even before that, buy some time until they realized they shouldn't just put everyone on a respirator). For all I know it may have saved my life and the life of several other people I know with comorbidities. Possibly my parents as well. Yes, a third of the country didn't go through the effort and a lot of people died in those states also. The country might still be functioning, but not necessarily well, with significant labor shortages, supply chain issues, high inflation, a looming recession, record high gas prices, etc. (not all of that is directly because of the pandemic, granted, but it sure didn't help).

coryrc 4y ago
I think we're in violent agreement.

kaba0 4y ago

The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.

TomSwirly 4y ago
> The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms. The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect the spread. Ebola fails to spread, not because it's deadly, but because the symptoms are almost immediate and dramatic. (I took graduate level course in the mathematics of epidemiology and got an A, which makes me no expert at all, but this is fairly fundamental.)
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  I gave the OP another example of a deadly and yet widespread virus, HIV. He is not completely off the ball, though. Our immune systems are rather good, so (with significant exceptions like HIV) if some virus doesn't kill us quickly, we tend to clear it out of the organism or at least get it under control, so it won't kill us at all. Viruses that are very deadly but take a long time to kill you (thus enhancing the risk of transmission), like HIV, aren't very typical.
inglor_cz 4y ago
A counterexample: HIV is pretty deadly, but slow to progress, so it infected a lot of people. In countries with insufficient healthcare infrastructure (Subsaharan Africa), it actually killed a significant percentage of the population, precisely because it was so successful in spreading. Without modern medicine, it could have wiped out entire cultures, especially those that were more sex-positive. (An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)