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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3746 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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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.

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

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.

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%.

Are we just making tangentially related, dubiously true assertions now?

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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