“Giving people an aggressive cold that might kill them in a few weeks if they’re already old and sick” doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful weapon.
It’s amusing you’re thinking of the Olympics rather than the fact that this is an election year. But let me highlight some facts around that.
The Trump party knows there’s no way they can permit a fair 2020 election because half of of them are going to jail.
I’ve been saying for a while now that they would love to gin up some excuse to sow enough confusion and delay into the elections that they could become a perpetual interim government (like half the rest of the administration is anyway). I expected it would come in the form of a manufactured “election security” event, or a false-flag “Antifa attack”, or a conveniently timed hurricane. But a pandemic would be a handy way to make it inconvenient or impossible to vote, and then challenge all the absentee ballots.
You’re free to label this a conspiracy theory, but it’s true that these all would be good ways to inject chaos into the election, and that chaos would serve a Trump party that cannot afford to lose a fair election.
I seriously doubt that. News stories, including scientific news stories, are written to shock. Transmission from person to person is slow. If it could infect that many people, we would have thousands of cruise ship customers sick.
Presuming a vaccine comes out, the only difference will be idiots spewing Big Pharma conspiracy theories about how vaccines cause coronavirus.
Didn’t the 1918 Spanish Flu kill about 50 million people after infecting about 500 million? There were only about 1.5 billion humans alive at the time. There are over 7.5 billion now. While it does suck for anyone who loses a loved one to the virus but humanity, over all, hardly notices the blip.
If it starts moving into the Spanish Flu levels of epidemic, then hold on. If 1/3 of everyone gets infected and 10% of the infected die…250 million is a much scarier number, but again humanity has recovered from worse - the Black Plague, which may have killed half the population of Europe.
We also have the potential for a fundamental loss of human rights in the US due to the present administration taking advantage of this situation. The more serious the virus is the more opportunity for this becomes a reality. It also has the potential to shift the balance of power to red states if the virus is easier spread in city like high density environments and effect the census thus the number of representatives due to deaths, and also the election of 2020 as many seriously ill people will not vote.
I suspect things put into motion by the Trump administration due to this ‘convenient’ virus will not be easily undone, and the US will be more and more leaving the world stage as the champion of democracy, and more towards a type of a North Korea type of isolationism and dictatorship.
I am pretty sure that is one hundred percent wrong, to be honest, and with all due respect. I cannot think of any time in human history, in any civilization, when anything like that happened. The reaction to a catastrophic global pandemic will be xenophobia.
It might not make sense, but xenophobia does not make sense.
I do think that some areas could potentially see dramatic political fallouts.
The Iranian government has been under huge pressure recently with an increasingly agitated population and now faces not only another crisis that directly affects the people but also members of the government themselves - a number of members of parliament have been taken ill.
We haven’t heard about any cases in North Korea and of course there is very little movement across its borders but should it suffer a major outbreak that could threaten stability there.
If the US administration is seen as having responding badly (and from here in the UK it looks like a total shit show) that could severely affect the elections and potentially the debate about reform of healthcare.
The Chinese government may find itself naturally loosening its grip on information and the way it controls professionals. There is a lot of anger in China about the early denials and the prosecution of the whistle blower. The Chinese government is not threatened of course but it will recognise its mistakes.
There might also be a lot of countries looking again at how reliant their businesses have become on China.
All this is before you consider the economic repercussions of large scale quarantines and stock market panics.
Death rates for people under age 50 who get the coronavirus are barely 1%. Death rates for the elderly are 10-15% though.
I think the spanish flu more killed the young and healthy due to cytokine storms.
If the coronavirus gets out, its mostly going to kill millions and millions of elderly people. Which (not to be a dick) will probably not affect society negatively as much as a virus that kills young and healthy people. The elderly are past their productive years and are mostly living on government welfare.
If, as a lot of people seem to suspect, the number of infected us much higher than reported ( either due to asymptomaticity, mild symptoms or willful misreporting), then the death-rate is correspondingly lower. If low enough, we will in effect ignore it. Low enough is somewhere between 0.05 % (flu - which we largely take in stride) and 2.3% (reported Covid19 lethality, which has our panties in a wad) I guess if lethality is sub 1%, it will become unremarkable quickly.
It wouldn’t be unremarkable, if we had a flu season that was twice as deadly as normal (normal flu + Corvid19). This is especially true because I think they’d multiply, not add–there will be people that would have survived either won’t survive both. It’s not the Black Death, but Double Flu isn’t nothing.
Let’s say it becomes endemic and infects most of humanity, and the death rate is somewhere around 1%. If the 1% are mostly elderly or already have health problems, I don’t see how (in a ruthlessly pragmatic sense) it has much significance for civilization. Many of the victims are likely to be economically non-productive people who were already utilizing significant long term healthcare resources.
But this assumes that the 99% recover quickly and completely. It seems to me that it would be far more significant if (say) 10% of those infected do not die, but develop significant long term health problems from the disease. So far as I’m aware, there’s no evidence of that at this stage.
The other issue that I haven’t seen any data on is how sensitive the spread is to seasonal temperature. With most of the world’s population in the northern hemisphere, it would obviously be good if rising spring temperatures slowed it down, to buy some time to develop and mass produce a vaccine.
But the Spanish flu (not Spanish, actually caused by Hastur, imho *) didnt really change the world that much- and that was on top of losing the cream of Europe’s young men.
It did change economics and the demand for labor some- oddly as shown on Downton Abbey.
- OK, that was in a CoC game, so sue me. :smack:
Cite? BTW Social Security and MediCare are not “welfare”. We paid, and continue to pay. And some elders we associate with still work productively. Elders outside the first world may also be surviving without welfare. Much of the planet is outside the US, y’know. As for US government welfare, check out agribiz subsidies and corporate tax breaks.
But that’s stretching the topic. Will global deaths of tens of millions or more wreck modern civilization*? Probably not. Will a pandemic set global communications and industry on a different course, more insular? I’d bet on it.
- Ah, civilization. An anecdote: Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization. “I think it would be a very good idea,” he replied.
No they are not welfare. However the elderly dying off would be a economic gain as those people will no longer be collecting.
The question was how would a pandemic affect civilization.
A pandemic that kills the elderly would do less damage on a society wide level than one that kills the young and healthy. Thats just the way it is.
If you have 2 possible pandemics.
- kills tons of elderly people
- Causes massive malnutrition among young people
The second will cause far worse problems for society since those young people will have lifelong damage to their health and productivity. The first will be less damaging since those people are past their productive years.
The Spanish Flu was getting pretty close to shutting down society when it flared out. It came up just short.
The question would be, I guess, is whether it’s possible for an influenza to be worse than that. The second wave of Spanish flu was incredibly vicious. A disease of such lethality, however, burns itself out by killing its carriers and frightening away everyone else - and that was in a time when much less was known about such things and governments were censoring everything (it’s called Spanish flu because the Spanish press was not censored, thus giving the false impression it was worse there.)
Spanish flu killed as many as it did in part not because the virus killed the patient but because the symptoms led to bacterial infections piling on, something for which we have far more understanding and coping strategies now.
Worse case scenario: full worldwide outbreak and the death rate is between 2-3%. We all lose someone we know. The world keeps spinning.
The realistic worst case scenario is that something like this year becomes the new normal. Flu seasons vary in severity, with this year being an unusually bad one. A typical year of flu plus widespread coronavirus is probably about that bad.
Now, how many of you have noticed an economic or other societal impact from the flu being worse than usual this year?
There’s that, which would be terrible.
Also imagine a new normal where the pool of healthy working adults drops by some crazy number like 1%. Just suddenly 1% of GDP drops off the map and stays there because that many people are perpetually sick or quarantined.
So three weeks in?
My guesses.
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International travel will be much restricted. At least visa-free, pick up your passport and jump on a plane, will be gone for the foreseeable future.
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Greater slack in hospital systems will be mandated by regulation.
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Attempt to achieve some sort of self-sufficiency in the manufacture of medical devices such as ventilators.
You were saying?:eek::smack: