jlf1961
Posts: 14840
Joined: 6/10/2008
From: Somewhere Texas
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quote:
ORIGINAL: WhoreMods
New York and London are both shitholes full of pondlife. A mass epidemic would more likely kill off the people there worth keeping than the scum (Murphy's law being what it is), but in the case of an extinction level epidemic taking place in either, that's an excuse to drop a neutron bomb and sterilise the territory, or (more likely) impose a quarantine cordon and kill everybody who tries to cross it, right?
Except it would not be limited to those two cities, it would be every city with an international and regional airport, and every large town with a intercity bus station or train station.
The best example is this:
Patient zero walks through a regional airport that connects to five major hubs, he infects say five people while going to his flight, then five more on the flight itself.
While none are symptomatic at the time they passed on the virus, everyone that they infected will pass it on to an equal number of people, who continue the chain.
Within 24 hours the virus is now world wide and spreading from the international hub airports to regional to train and bus stations, and patient zero is showing symptoms, as well as those he initially passed the bug on to.
Now lets say that in three of each these groups, the virus leads to critical conditions, and two basically seem to have nothing more than a mild case of the flu or maybe a common cold, so they do not go to see a doctor. So out of each group we have 3 in the hospital and two that are walking around passing the bug on because they are not in major distress.
By the time the doctors around the world figure out there is a new flu out there that is highly contagious and lethal, there would be few exceptions where the bug has not reached and reared its ugly head.
And remember, every carrier is infecting 5 people.
So by the time the medical community can spread the alarm and recommend travel restrictions, it is already too late.
So, again using the flu as our hypothetical bug, we know that the mortality rate is dependent on a number of factors, usually. But occasionally a bug comes along that does not follow the rules.
We also know that the flu viruses have a high mutation rate, hence the number of variant strains of a flu virus that crops up during an outbreak, some of which look at the vaccines and laugh and kicks ass while telling the medical world to suck its viral dick.
So, the average flu strain has in infection rate of 2-3 (as in the case of the 1918 Spanish flu,) but we have a new one that is more like 4-5.
The average flu strain has a mortality rate of 1.4 or 1.4 people out of 100.
The Spanish flu had a mortality rate of between 10 and 15, and the simple truth is that particular strain showed up once, then quietly went on vacation for the last 99 years.
Every other flu strain that has popped up since then, does so in cycles, which means they can develop either a specific vaccine or a broad spectrum vaccine. But to do either, they need a viable sample of the virus.
There are no samples of the Spanish flu from 1918.
And contrary to some movies, flu bugs that affect humans do not necessarily affect other primates, however, the same strain that Joe Somebody gets could easily be caught by pigs, birds and even dogs and cats.
Now concerning the Spanish flu, the biggest fear is that it has been laying around in some population of companion species (species that can catch the same strain as humans) and mutating while not actually making the jump back to a human carrier.
Or it could be laying dormant in some nice grave in some cold climate in the body of a victim buried where the summer temps do not get high enough to promote total decomposition. A sick medical joke is that it is laying around in the body of some Eskimo (or ww1 vet who made it home to northern frozen bumfuck before the flu killed him) buried in the permafrost waiting for some idiot to accidentally dig it up.
So lets say some idiot stumbles upon the grave of the poor soul while building a pipeline or some such, they move the body, but in the process, the body warms enough for the virus to become active and infect said idiot. They get sick as hell, and is air lifted to the nearest hospital.
That hospital is not equipped to handle whatever they are seeing (not all small hospitals have an isolation ward) so they in turn fly the poor idiot to a major hospital.
Suddenly you have patient zero with a deadly flu strain that has been sitting around mutating in the warm months and stewing then going dormant in the winters.
And if the doctors treating said idiot fail to realize that what he has/had is a contagious pathogen (and we have not mentioned mr. idiot's coworkers) until it is too late and suddenly you have a host of carriers running around giving the gift to everyone they shake hands with or happen to be close enough for the virus to spread via air transmission.
Then you have to factor in the not so recently ended practice of throwing antibiotics at every little thing by doctors, which is a nasty double edged sword. You see, by using antibiotics so frequently, the over all affect is a general weakening of the herd immune system.
In this case, the herd is the general human population.
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Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?
You cannot control who comes into your life, but you can control which airlock you throw them out of.
Paranoid Paramilitary Gun Loving Conspiracy Theorist AND EQUAL OPPORTUNI
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