| Proud90sKid |
October 8th 2026 12:10 PM |
Re: Plague case in Russia
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.
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