I don’t know that it’s that dire. “More deadly” doesn’t mean a disease will kill more people. A virus or bacteria has to be infectious enough to spread quickly, not kill enough people that are infected to allow people to spread it without causing it to die with them, but still be deadly enough to be noteworthy. COVID ticked all of those boxes. Bird Flu might as well, if it becomes human-to-human transmissible (which seems more likely every day), but I guess we’ll see.
That’s an interesting but grim point. Ebola, for example, is both very deadly and very infectious, but that combination means that outbreaks tend to burn out before spreading widely. One of the early things that scared me about COVID in late 2019 was the rumors of “asymptomatic spreading” that were coming out of China.
That wasn’t the only “oh shit” thing about COVID and the way things were handled early on, but it was a bad one.
I hate that people try to lecture others on how bad the last pandemic was handled but they haven’t even understood this very basic and intuitive property of infectious diseases.
To me it’s just ridiculous to somehow speak for “rationality”, “facts” or “the science”, only to proceed to ignore basic facts and evidence and resort to fearmongering instead.
I don’t know that it’s that dire. “More deadly” doesn’t mean a disease will kill more people. A virus or bacteria has to be infectious enough to spread quickly, not kill enough people that are infected to allow people to spread it without causing it to die with them, but still be deadly enough to be noteworthy. COVID ticked all of those boxes. Bird Flu might as well, if it becomes human-to-human transmissible (which seems more likely every day), but I guess we’ll see.
That’s an interesting but grim point. Ebola, for example, is both very deadly and very infectious, but that combination means that outbreaks tend to burn out before spreading widely. One of the early things that scared me about COVID in late 2019 was the rumors of “asymptomatic spreading” that were coming out of China.
That wasn’t the only “oh shit” thing about COVID and the way things were handled early on, but it was a bad one.
I hate that people try to lecture others on how bad the last pandemic was handled but they haven’t even understood this very basic and intuitive property of infectious diseases.
To me it’s just ridiculous to somehow speak for “rationality”, “facts” or “the science”, only to proceed to ignore basic facts and evidence and resort to fearmongering instead.