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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2809 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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If the real fatality rate is sub-5% among young and healthy people, this kind of virus panic should be laughable.

To put a 5% CFR into perspective, the US military's plans for responding to a bioattack give the CFR for bubonic plague "with prompt, effective therapy" as 5%. A quick google suggests this is based on third world countries where plague is endemic, and "prompt, effective therapy" means cheap antibiotics and not much more. And of course it is a whole-population CFR.

So a disease with 5% CFR specifically among young healthy people with access to 1st-world medicine is significantly worse than the plague. I don't think we would be laughing off a plague pandemic, let alone the hypothetical @2rafa pandemic.

There is a reason why I give "Computer, what is the DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Yersina pestis?" as an easy example of an existential AI risk when talking to normies.

It’s worth noting that the Black Death spreads by fleas on rats- mass spread in the first world is rather unlikely, and there are periodic outbreaks these days but mostly among the homeless.

Y. pestis is really good at undergoing selection for respiratory spread during the course of a plague and is much better at being a viable respiratory pathogen than most bacteria...It still won't ever be an existential scale risk for 1st world governments no matter how extensively modified someone makes it

There is a reason why I give "Computer, what is the DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Yersina pestis?" as an easy example of an existential AI risk when talking to normies.

Normies don't need an AI to find that information. That information is available on google and in a trivially digestible way. What isn't trivial is that manufacturing your designer AI risk level bioweapon at the scale required to get it out into the environment and start snowballing requires $10 million in specialized facilities, equipment and reagents. At the moment surveillance for this type of attack is ok. AI, ironically probably makes this scenario less likely because the surveillance infrastructure is going to exponentially outpace AI assisted attempts to establish a new bioweapons lab. So many different pieces need to come together and just a handful of them need to be flagged to stop it completely.

5% is an enormous fatality rate. There's 140 million people under 25 in the country. If we assume they ~all get infected (as they did with covid) that's seven million dead. The real number would be way worse because of obesity.

Smallpox fatality rate was 3% and it was so bad that we literally drove it extinct in the wild.

We drove it extinct because there weren't any animal reservoirs of the disease.

There's plenty of diseases without animal reservoirs. We drove it extinct rather than another because of its deadliness.

I actually don't think that's true. Almost all of the infectious diseases we've driven (near) extinct were much milder than smallpox, but we still eliminated them because they had 0 significant animal reservoirs and so it was easy to do.

In high-trust societies with usual first-world levels of state capacity, any disease with a safe and effective vaccine will be eliminated. The return of measles in the US and UK is visible evidence of falling social trust in exactly the same way that locked cabinets in stores are.

The thing that is unusual about smallpox (and, hopefully, polio) is that we committed the required resources to vaccinate everyone even in hard-to-reach parts of the third world.

You're looking at it the wrong way. The question is not "do eliminated diseases have animal reservoirs", it's "are diseases with animal reservoirs eliminated". And there are plenty that are not. It took decades or even centuries depending on when you start counting to eliminate smallpox.

The rough blueprint to eradicate birdflu would be to find every live or dead, bird and mammal on earth(and at sea) and vaccinate or cremate them. What I'm trying to communicate is that any serious virus with an animal reservoir is impossible to globally eradicate without several orders of magnitude more political will or state capacity than has ever existed. Smallpox was so easy to eradicate with a vaccine and quarantines that the U.S. and USSR accidentally realized they were right next to the finish line when they set out on an initiative to globally eradicate it.

any serious virus with an animal reservoir is impossible to globally eradicate without several orders of magnitude more political will or state capacity than has ever existed

Yes, obviously. This has nothing to do with my point, which is that the only virus considered serious enough and feasible enough to fully eradicate had a fatality rate under 5%.

The political desire to do this was complicated by the cold war and the realization by both the US and USSR that helping to create public health infrastructure in the very weak and nascent states where the disease persisted was strategically important to expand their spheres of influence.

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I don’t know what to say, but that’s the threshold at which I might be willing to sacrifice another year+ of basic freedom in the communal interest. Anything less and, to paraphrase Boris Johnson, ‘let it rip’. Most people have 25-30 good years of adult life if they’re lucky (before the body starts noticeably deteriorating / ageing catches up to you). 4% of that is a lot.

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