Triggering: Plague case in Russia

[Mindfulness.]

There have been reports that a laboratory worker in Russia has died due to being exposed to a pneumonic plague pathogen, after dropping a test tube. Nearly 200 of her contacts are under medical observation. Russian authorities deny a link to the bacterial infection. The US is monitoring the situation.

Thoughts?

[Dude111]

Hopefully it wont come to anything but I wouldnt put it past US GOVT to try and scare people as they did in 2020!!

[~Misguided Ghosts~]

I’m thinking keep monitoring but I’m not super worried at this time. It seems isolated to me and they’ve taken the time to put the contacts on observation. They’re being proactive and it’s not something so new that we know nothing about it. So I think we’ll be okay.

[Mindfulness.]

Let's hope it doesn't become the next Covid 2.0.

[Proud90sKid]

It all depends on the R0 number and early containment. SARS was actually COVID 1.0. COVID itself was COVID 2.0. SARS was eradicated without need for vaccine because of lower R0 number and sufficiency of quarantine measures for the sick. Because R0 was around 2 for the early 2000s SARS coronavirus outbreak, there was potential for pandemic if it wasn't contained. However, infection was not only obvious in almost cases, it produced severe enough symptoms that people largely had little opposition to remaining in bed and quarantining themselves. These measures reduced the effective R0 number. Asymptomatic or mild symptomatic spread of COVID (where some people know they have it but feel good enough to live life as normal) and a higher R0 number caused that disease to blow up. There have been many diseases that have made headlines but didn't cause comparable global disruption: ebola outbreak in 2014, zika around 2016, swine flu (high enough R0 to cause a pandemic in 2009 but low enough death rate to not be a much bigger problem than seasonal flu), the bird flu scare, etc. None of these germs were primed to cause a COVID situation or worse though. Human to human transmission can't escalate into a pandemic unless it happens often enough(by often enough, I mean that each infected person infects at least slightly greater than 1 other on average despite quarantining the sick). You need high R0 number (the number of people an average infected person will infect) coupled with lack of ability to identify and quickly isolate the sick (that ability saved us from facing a "COVID-but much worse" scenario in the early 2000s with SARS-Cov-1) to produce a major pandemic.

[Cinnamon.]

I don't know what's going on in Russia since there isn't a link shared. All I know regarding Russia is the war they have with Ukraine. Like Dez, whatever's going on over there, I believe this is just an isolated incident. Russia may be our nemesis but they're not like China; China had the power to engineer what would become Covid-19, Russia doesn't have that. They're putting all their resources into destroying Ukraine.