UKC

This post is about strategy so it will probably come across as a bit impersonal; my apologies about that, no offence is intended towards those currently ill, struggling, etc. (which I've posted about on other threads)...

So CV is pretty bad and it's having a nasty effect on the world, but in world population terms it's really only a little glitch. But it's left me with some questions:

1. How would the world cope with something spreading like CV, but being a really nasty virus - mortality rate 10% or more?

2. Keeping "1." in mind - is the world going to learn some useful pandemic lessons to ensure that if "1." ever happens, the worldwide death toll won't be more than ONE BILLION.

3. Where do these viruses come from?

Some info/thoughts...

Smallpox was (I believe) the nastiest virus ever from a human point of view. Spread easily and the mortality rate was something like 30%. Maybe that would be less with modern medicine etc. but something equivalent to smallpox now would be truly catastrophic.

It seems that lots of these viruses (like CV) originate from China, the rest of the far east and Africa. I don't think it's just size of population. I think lots of these viruses originate in other species and societies that eat a wider variety of meat are more likely to get a virus to transfer to humans. Now I may be wrong with this thinking, but if it is correct, what can we do to encourage those societies to change their eating habits so that the risk to humanity is reduced?

It's not so much the eating of wild meats... Everyone does it, to some degree. It is the keeping of live wild animals, often many species in very close proximity to high density human populations and or in market with meats for sale. Species that are rarely in contact, these markets increase the chance of viruses jumping across species etc. 

So regulations. It's that and stopping flights, boats and land borders as soon as cases appear. That in turn will apply the economic pressure for countries like China to regulate markets.  

Some sort of 'smoke alarm' or sensor for new virus's ?

Perhaps with living cells and immune systems to ignore those not of interest.

Just the germ of a possible idea.

Huge stockpile of PPE - it would have to be rotated with new stock in and old stock out before it time expires.

Ventilators or other equipment that might be in short supply. A dozen examples of a simpler/older version that can be sent out with full engineering drawings to a dozen large & small companies to manufacture using basic techniques at short notice.

I beleive that once you get to 10+% moratility you would just need to apply a similar lockdown as was applied China and it would burn out pretty quick.

The Human race has overcome far worse crises than Corona in the past and will continue to do so with its usual ingenuity. 

However we do need a better early-warning system, to which every nation signs up. It seems to be emerging now that CV was happening in China in the middle of November but thanks to State mendacity China didn't admit it until too late.

The early warning system was in place... it was in the news every day in January and ever international airport remained open. Etc. 

Yes I recall hearing something around this a few years ago, possibly on Inside Science during the Ebola outbreak. The basic principle behind it is that the more deadly a virus is, the easier it is to wipe out. If it kills a human in a matter of hours/days then it's less likely to be transmitted as symptoms are fast to appear and isolation can be done immediately. Whereas we look at Covid where you can show zero symptoms for two weeks and pass it on throughout that time, but the mortality rate is relatively low. The point was that the fast killers are actually evolutionary duds, not that that helps those who it kills of course!

As per my OP, I was concerned about a virus with the spreading power of CV (i.e. infectious before symptoms, takes some time to act), but with much higher mortality. I'm aware of stuff like Ebola suffering from "burn-out" because it kills too quickly, but I don't think a really deadly virus necessarily has to behave like this.

I think it's perfectly likely that CV-20 or whatever, etc could be much worse - in the same way as each year's flu virus is more or less deadly.

I suspect that something really deadly would worry authorities more quickly and that lockdowns would be drastic, rigidly enforced, etc. Then your assertion might be correct, however with the flight connectivity of the current world, it might be too little, too late. Not really something I want to see tested out.

Considering the cost and complexity of the LHC, looking for new sub-atomic particles which do not pose any threat.  It does not seem unreasonable or unjustified to build a global virus detector attempting to track all those existing and emerging.  Like space junk and asteroids threats are tracked.  Passenger aircraft cabin air filters could be used for sample collection. Giving distribution data in real time.

And most still are...

Have a look at Flightradar - air traffic still at just over 50% of normal - some of those are DHL, UPS etc. and maybe flights to retrieve citizens from abroad but still loads - especially over USA. For example, yesterday evening there were 58 flights in the air going to/from Honolulu from/to the rest of the USA!

Two  ideas that may make a difference to spread via air travel .

Permanent Infra red cameras airport departure and arrival to check who may have a temperature .

Better filtration of air on board an aircraft. 

How often do you fly without picking up a bug?

Second guessing what's needed is tricky.  It would be frustrating to have 100,000 ventilators for next time and then discovers it's say heart machines we need.

Spot on.

Anybody who followed the news only had to listen and figure it out.

you mean ebola 

What would be better, both for the future pandemic situation and society in general would be an investment in 3D printing technology. Why have a stockpile of equipment that might not be the thing you need, or a production line tooled for vastly more capacity than you need most the time if you could have a generic manufacturing unit that could produce 90% of whatever you need once you decide what that thing is?

The current generation of printers is not there yet, but they’re dramatically more capable than they were a few years ago.

1. Listen to the suggestion scientists who develop the strategies from complex modelling. The data from this outbreak will be used to model future disease and we will learn from every mistake or success.

2. No point in judging the current crisis by the daily outcome, judge it by the long term result with hindsight and actual data rather than gut feelings.

3. Do the above and don't listen to armchair experts on UKC or any other social media telling you to do otherwise. 

It's checking temps on infected people who have no symptoms that has given countries false confidence, planes still fly, the virus is still transmitted. 

Plus.. you presume the next virus will mirror covid19... it could be more like Ebola, dengue, west nile, zika, hiv... or something completely different again. 

The only initial solution is more rapid quarantine, global efforts on lab work etc  

I had a look at this a few years ago after one of the periodic media stories about people thinking they were catching bugs while flying.  I was in planes quite a bit at the time so wanted to find out if I should be doing something else to avoid getting ill. Have a search around for the treatment methods - I got quite a surprise.

They have been truly catastrophic in the past.

The Antoine plague pretty much spelt the end of the Western Roman Empire(probably smallpox or measles)

The Eastern Roman empire never really recovered after the plagues of Justinian although that also impacted far wider as well.

Black death obviously had massive impact although, taking the dispassionate look, probably for the best in the long run. The destruction of the feudal system in England for example.

I dont think it is so much eating habits as ability to come into contact with sub populations we havent met in the past. As humanity expands out we encroach ever more on what remains.

In Europe chances are we have come across pretty much everything we could have (short of mutations) whereas once someone chops deeper into that ancient woodland you get the chance to meet something new.

Based on meetings that I attended when the farming was facing the threat of BTV8 and Schmallenberg it is just as likely that the next novel virus outbreak will be insect-borne.

Looking ob the bright side if the current shutdown slows climate change we may be a little safer from such threats in the UK for a few years.

1 and 2.  Our best shot is probably if different countries maintain different strategies of attacking the current pandemic.  While we'll obviously never get perfect, RCT-level data for each of the different interventions they try, we might in hindsight see some trends that can point us in the right direction for next time.  For example, right now it's looking like the South Korea and German approach of massive testing combined with contact tracing is working well.  

3.  The warmer the climate, the more biodiverse it is.  Also, bats coexist with many viruses for a variety of reasons, and China has a lot of bats, to the extent that this 2019 paper predicted a bat-borne coronavirus outbreak starting in China!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/

What’s noticeable is that virtually every government fumbled the ball, China was just the first. The Spanish thought they would only get a few cases. The NHS had at least six weeks to get mobilised/equipped but  the politicians squandered that time waffling about herd immunity. Our Pandemic plan apparently was 9 years old.

I don't think I have ever picked up a bug on air travel. Maybe I have just been lucky

Presumably travel bans have to be put in place early if a new virus is detected. At least a ban in travel from that area, but maybe an immediate international travel ban (if we could convince countries to organise that) for a couple of weeks or whatever is deemed necessary to contain it. It would be expensive and cost a lot, but not as much as the full lockdown we are in now. I guess there could likely be exemptions for goods, just no passenger travel? 

Arent many of those not new viruses as such but ones that generally we (plus the livestock) arent generally exposed to due to climatic conditions preventing either them or their hosts.

Malaria would be another which as things change may become a threat in this country again.

Hence small numbers of various items designed, built and tested based on old technology that can be mass produced at short notice without needing the latest technology or components that might be in short supply.

Nope, as I mentioned above, specifically not something like Ebola which is too quick so containment (if done properly) works quickly as well. I mean something that's innocuous at the beginning but deadly at the end, so gets easily transmitted, then gives you symptoms, then kills you.

I did write may help.

Not a 100% solution but might take some transmitters of some viruses out of the loop.

There is, and has always been, research in emerging diseases and animal virology. So that is already being done. Just detecting viruses by environmental sampling is probably not very useful, there is just too much out there, you need to look at animal markets, bushmeat, farm animals in newly degraded rainforst areas, ...

A bat borne coronavirus jumping to humans at a Chinese wet market would not have paid out a lot in the Next Pandemic office sweepstakes. Something like that is pretty much the default scenario for epidemiology war games.

The real bad one would be a combination of the infectivity of Sars2 and the death rate of MERS. Luckily there seem to be intrinsic reasons why a given coronavirus is unlikely to have both properties at once.

CB

Malaria isn't a virus.

(That's a comment in the context of the subject of this thread. Of course, malaria could obviously become a wider threat owing to climate change.)

Is that not environmental sampling ?

My suggestion was an automated virus detection and cataloging machine.  I don't know how it would work but with an LHC budget it should be possible.

“Making sense” podcast #191 is an interview with a Johns Hopkins virologist that explores some of this and isn’t too dry.

Look up the programme 'Return of the Black Death'. More 4 were going to repeat it on the 22nd, but chose to pull it (interestingly, ITV2 screened 'Contagion' only last night...

It's about the black death in London, in 1349 (but linked to the excavation for Crossrail at Charterhouse). It estimated that 60% of the then population of London died.

The LHC budget is small in comparison to medicine and healthcare costs. The entire machine was built with about the cost of developing two new medicines.

Your sampling machine will only be useful if doctors in 3rd world countries can use them. This requires a big upgrade in the capabilities of the healthcare systems in a lot of countries.

So what you are looking for is more international development aid.

In environmental sampling in the strict sense you simply collect viruses and microorganisms from soil, air, or water by washing and filtering, extract the DNA, and sequence whatever you collect. This gives you tons of sequences that you then computationally assign to various "species". For most of these you can at best tell to which group they belong, but when that kind of research became feasible (and affordable) there were major surprises. Older studies had e.g. missed entire classes of bacteria that are now thought to make up something like 20-30% of the biomass in certain ocean regions.

A rather large fraction of the DNA isolated from water and air is viruses. Many of these are bacteriophages, so do not affect us directly. There is also plenty of other presumptive virus DNA, and many of these viruses may be able to infect human cells.

However, this approach is unlikely to work as an early warning system, you are bound to get swamped by irrelevant stuff. Better to look at bushmeat and wet markets, bat colonies, smallhold farms where people share their house with pigs and ducks, and other plausible sources for zoonoses.

CB

does it have to be a virus or could we have a resistant bacteria? - tuberculosis or gonorrhea

maybe a resistant fungus - Candida 

a fungus that can use the cells in the brain as an intelligence for its own purposes

true but I was responding to those things being listed as novel threats as opposed to us, as in the UK, becoming more vulnerable to them due to climate change.

How about a nematode worm that uses mind control to make you climb something, and makes your eyes bulge and wriggle like caterpillars whilst filling them with eggs so that bird bites your eye off and carries the eggs away?

youtube.com/watch?v=Go_LIz7kTok&

Looks as if it's already arrived:

see the picture of what happened to the cop down the page (with the pair on the motorbike)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-52077395

Could we outsmart it?

Ants cant

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis

Whilst slightly less proof of a lack of benevolent god there is toxoplasma gondii.  Its lifecycle is shared between cats (where it reproduces) and rodents. Infected rodents lose their fear of cats and actually become attracted to cat urine which tends to result in them becoming dinner.

There is some evidence that it changes infected humans behaviour as well. Although other studies seem to show no change so its one of those listed under more research required.