| | | You can go wayyy back to the Silicon Investor discussion about sars and then H5N1 from 2003 with Henry Niman as the registered expert. Search him on Google for more recent decades.
We had this whole WuFlu thing buttoned down then. Since then we have just been waiting for the day that one of the corona viruses combined with a regular human flu in one individual [viruses can mate and swap DNA]. The descendants of those combined viruses could have the lethality of the killer parent with the contagion of the regular human flu.
Very fortunately, this WuFlu has very low lethality around 5% of those infected and maybe lower if early treatment with hydroxychloroquine, zinc and the antibiotic is as effective as is reported.
If we got the short straw and the disease was a humanized H5N1 we would be in serious trouble with about 60% or even 70% mortality and a remnant economic world afterwards. The combination disease and famine/war following and during could have seen 90% world population reduction. Maybe that's an overly bleak possibility but 700 million people would still be quite a lot and more than when the 19th century began and people could survive, mostly, on local production without all mod cons, many of which would stop working.
I was in Beijing aka Peking Xmas 2003 and sars was the problem. Fortunately, it was not humanized and did not amount to anything. This time I was in Vietnam and Singapore at the beginning of Feb when the first Singapore case popped up 300 metres from me. I promise I was not delivering these viruses on behalf of the CIA.
It's going to have to be everyone back to work at Easter because the economic cost is too vast and the death rate too low to stop the world, and fail to stop the virus anyway as it will not be eliminated everywhere and will sneak here and there for another year or two until it fizzles out due to mask wearing and precautions people now know to take. Such as not sharing yum char, buffets, and other contaminating mechanisms such as packed buses, trains, and airliners without high quality breathing protection, mosh pits and whatnot.
AIDS soon fizzled out when people understood mechanisms of transmission and stopped doing that. Initially authorities lie or are just plain stupid, such as in 1986 they were warning men that they could catch HIV from women but of course they can't very well. They didn't want to be plain and warn that it was primarily a male to partner phenomenon with extra vectors such as shared needles, blood transfusion and other body fluids into the blood stream of others. Now we hardly hear about AIDS. Even in Africa it's not such a calamitous catastrophe as it was when something like 20% of Africans were infected [not Moslems who are brutally strict in sexual behaviour]. A doctor friend from South Africa told me that genital lesions in Africans were common so there was a bonus mechanism of infection. And monogamy wasn't a big deal.
We should look on WuFlu as a little training course for the main event, which might be averted if the main source which is the "wet markets" of barbarity in China and south Asia are shut down and animal farming is improved. Hens and pigs act as good breeding grounds too. Huge culls have been necessary to stop disease.
Mqurice |
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