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Originally Posted by Vicky.
When warmer weather comes, its not likely to spread. Wasnt that basically the rationale behind opening up in summer...that the cold weather would bring more covid?
I hope to god I am wrong in a way, though it might be best for me to be right depending on..how it all goes down, but I think the next risk to us is going to be a very bad flu/season. We are so hyper focused on covid...everythings about covid, and some seem to be congratulating the amazingness of 'eradicating flu' but...its not bloody gone.
A LOT of the covid stuff has made me wonder how the **** we would deal with a 'real', very deadly pandemic though. Fear levels would be higher I guess, which helps government to control it...
Edit. The wording was horrendous there. Obviously this is a real pandemic. I meant....serious. Meaning, actual quite high death rate or very bad illness rate. We were almost 'lucky' with this one tbh, when compared to the near misses of SARS, MERS and the rates for that :S (discovered just yesterday that some other similar things had like..30% death rate, and it scared the crap out of me)
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Things that kill a large percentage tend to progress fast, and because they progress so fast, it limits their ability to spread. Basically, the only reason Covid has been able to become a full global pandemic is because 50%+ of cases are asymptomatic spreaders and like another 30%+ mild-symptom spreaders. There's a reason that, despite ebola having been active for decades now, it hasn't ever been a real risk of progressing to pandemic or even epidemic levels. The same goes for MERS - quite scary fatality rates but tiny case numbers.
SARS 1.0 is an interesting one... The death rate of KNOWN cases/deaths is just under 10%, but that's 800ish deaths in 8000ish known cases. When you think back to the early days of Covid (SARS2) when we had no idea of the scale of infections... It was quite common to see "reported case fatality rates" of 7 to 8% and some even higher, because we had no idea how many cases there actually were.
In short, it's quite likely that there were far more than 8000 SARS cases, but that 800 deaths is accurate. Depending on how many unreported or asymptomatic cases there were... It's really very possible that the true "OG SARS" fatality risk is not that much higher than SARS-2 (Covid).
Its fairly likely that the MERS fatality rate is considerably lower than 30% too, the reported cases are far too low to give an accurate picture. It's probably still significantly higher that other coronaviruses though.