>However WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed in a statement it "does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency" and advised countries against closing their borders.
Also, the article says surveillance picked up the spread late. I wonder if the US's pulling back from the WHO and other international functions had anything to do with this, it used to make up a big chunk of its resources and staff.
That said I'm quite hopeful, since there is a vaccine for other strains.
Is that like a general rule, or pure bunk? (I'd probably assume the answer 'depends').
1. It could spread airborne;
2. It spread relatively easily. Not quite measles-level of contagiousness but still, pretty good;
3. Unlike something like the flu, there really wasn't any kind of natural resistance. What we now call the modern flu is a descendant of the Spanish flu that killed tends of millions in 1919-1920 in its first outbreak and it becamse less lethal for a variety of reasons; and
4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. The flu can also spread asymptomatically but AFAIK it's less common. People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.
Still, what's probably most concerning about Covid is the number of people who truly believe it was and is fake. The public health implications of that as well as the societal and psychological impacts is something we're going to be studying for decades to come.
The exact contagion mechanism for hantavirus isn't confirmed. Previously it's been from, say, rat to human. It's believed there was human-to-human transmission with the plague cruise ship of doom but whatever the case, it's simply not as contagious.
Ebola generally requires contact to spread. How it's spread in a lot of these African regions has historically been from funeral rites. Family of the deceased would touch the body and this contact would spread the disease. So while it was quite contagious, it didn't spread airborne (as far as we know). It's also quite lethal, which naturally tends to limit spread. The king of long-dormant viruses is of course HIV.
But at least we aren't dealing with cordyceps [1] so we've got that going for us at least.
[1]: https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Cordyceps_brain_infectio...
Do you have any other fantasy tales you’d like to tell?
No, it wasn’t. Remember. Officials told us it wasn’t. Until they changed their position and it suddenly was.
Of course, anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about coronaviruses knew it was probably airborne.
> 3. Unlike something like the flu, there really wasn't any kind of natural resistance.
This is misleading. There isn’t really any natural resistance to any novel virus. For any novel virus it typically takes about two weeks to mount and implement an immune response.
> What we now call the modern flu is a descendant of the Spanish flu that killed tends of millions in 1919-1920 in its first outbreak and it becamse less lethal for a variety of reasons
This is misleading. The Spanish flu probably didn’t arrive on a comet in the winter of 1919. In all likelihood it too is descendant from earlier flu / flu-like viruses.
> 4. (This is the big one) It would spread when the carrier was asymptomatic. The flu can also spread asymptomatically but AFAIK it's less common. People with the flu tend to self-isolate showing symptoms.
Come on now. Prior to COVID people would dose up on stimulants and decongestants and power through until they either recovered, or couldn’t stand up. Going about sneezing and coughing. I’ve even seen people I’ve worked with intentionally coughing on colleagues keyboards or tools. Haha!
> Still, what's probably most concerning about Covid is the number of people who truly believe it was and is fake.
I’m not saying it was fake. But if it was really as deadly as they say it was, you’d think I would know someone who knew some who knew someone who suffered injury or death from the virus. In haven’t even ever met anyone who claimed they had met someone who claimed they had met someone who had suffered injury or death from COVID-19.
> 5. Text input in iOS still sucks.
This I agrew with 199#
Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern
https://www.who.int/news/item/17-07-2019-ebola-outbreak-in-t...
MontagFTB•49m ago
Insanity•45m ago
But I have no clue how far along vaccines are, and even if they exist how feasible it would be to use in e.g Congo. Similar to how we can treat tuberculosis, yet many people keep dying of it.