81–90 of 350 posts
If I were working in a lab I’d think it was hilarious to write “smallpox” on random bottles. Probably good that I work in software and not biology.
Apparently this happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox > On July 1, 2014, six sealed glass vials of smallpox dated 1954, along with sample vials of other pathogens, were discovered in a cold storage room in an FDA laboratory at the National Institutes of Health location in Bethesda, Maryland. The smallpox vials were subsequently transferred to the custody of the CDC in Atlanta, where virus taken from…
A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID. COVID has a very low death rate and is comparable to the flu, whereas Smallpox kills 30% of people it infects and disfigures an even higher percentage. And my understanding is that it is just as contagious (may be wrong on this). Read up on Operation Dark Winter (2001 era wargame of a US smallpox outbreak) for details on how this might play out.…
Smallpox is significantly less infectious, and generally requires close and extended contact with a person who is coughing and infectious or a surface recently contaminated by someone with open sores. Original variant was about half as infectious as measles (the most infectious known human disease), and some of the many of the new Covid variants are very very close (about 80%) as infectious as measles. Difference bet…
I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Current estimates for smallpox R0 are all over the place (as are the Covid ones, but I digress) and run from 1-20, with contemporary numbers as high as 6:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11742399/
Measuring R0 is not like measuring a physical constant of the universe, or the seek latency of a hard drive or something. The value varies with time and context, and the best we ever get for a virus is a vague idea of relative infectiousness. Comparing virus X to virus Y based on R0 alone is largely a fool's errand, particularly for a virus that hasn't been in a human in decades.
Smallpox has rather infamously spread between stories of a building from a closed laboratory (this is disputed, but plausible), so I wouldn't be so quick to characterize it as requiring "close and extended contact":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...
> you walk by a group of people in the park and they’re infected
This has never been documented in the entire history of SARS-CoV2. For that matter, there have been almost no documented outdoor infections, in any context. These hysterical claims need to be put down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We aren’t even through the current scientist caused pandemic yet I'm astonished there are people that think like this on HN
It's unfortunate that all of this got politicized, but the fact is that nobody knows for sure where it came from nor does anyone know for sure where it didn't come from. I would say it's not a waste of time to review what labs are doing all over the world since the stakes are so high.
> In the event of an outbreak, the C.D.C. said, “there is enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States.” I wonder whether the CDC has re-evaluated their scenarios and simulations given the politicization of vaccines during this pandemic.
Smallpox, on the other hand, is absolutely grotesque in comparison. Highly visible and much more lethal. In terms of human perception I think that fear of catching it would overrule the fear of 'the government' or 'the pharmaceutical companies'. It also probably helps that the Smallpox vaccine has been around for a lot longer.
A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID. COVID has a very low death rate and is comparable to the flu, whereas Smallpox kills 30% of people it infects and disfigures an even higher percentage. And my understanding is that it is just as contagious (may be wrong on this). Read up on Operation Dark Winter (2001 era wargame of a US smallpox outbreak) for details on how this might play out.…
according to Johns Hopkins University, about 3.1 million people around the world had died of COVID-19 as of April 26, 2021.
The flu, meanwhile, kills between 290,000 to 650,000 people every year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID. COVID has a very low death rate and is comparable to the flu, whereas Smallpox kills 30% of people it infects and disfigures an even higher percentage. And my understanding is that it is just as contagious (may be wrong on this). Read up on Operation Dark Winter (2001 era wargame of a US smallpox outbreak) for details on how this might play out.…
> A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID Edit: fair enough there’s no vaccinations for smallpox anymore. But countries do still buy stockpiles
A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID. COVID has a very low death rate and is comparable to the flu, whereas Smallpox kills 30% of people it infects and disfigures an even higher percentage. And my understanding is that it is just as contagious (may be wrong on this). Read up on Operation Dark Winter (2001 era wargame of a US smallpox outbreak) for details on how this might play out.…
> A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID Edit: fair enough there’s no vaccinations for smallpox anymore. But countries do still buy stockpiles
A smallpox pandemic would be orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID. COVID has a very low death rate and is comparable to the flu, whereas Smallpox kills 30% of people it infects and disfigures an even higher percentage. And my understanding is that it is just as contagious (may be wrong on this). Read up on Operation Dark Winter (2001 era wargame of a US smallpox outbreak) for details on how this might play out.…
COVID is not comparable to the flu. It's 3-20x as deadly depending on a variety of factors. Smallpox would still be significantly more deadly than COVID individually, but I'd bet people would take lockdowns much more seriously for smallpox than they did for COVID, preventing a pandemic and resulting in fewer deaths overall. Especially because people believe falsehoods like "COVID is comparable to the flu" because it…
> In the event of an outbreak, the C.D.C. said, “there is enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States.” I wonder whether the CDC has re-evaluated their scenarios and simulations given the politicization of vaccines during this pandemic.