Paper simulating initial Covid-19 outbreak estimates only 30% pandemic chance

mercurynews.com

8 points·anaerobicover··5 comments

Only? 30% change is huge for potential pandemic.

The lesson seems to be that moderate mortality rate pathogens can fly under the radar long time.

> By characterizing the likely dynamics of the virus before it was discovered, we show that over two-thirds of SARS-CoV-2-like zoonotic events would be self-limited, dying out without igniting a pandemic. Our findings highlight the shortcomings of zoonosis surveillance approaches for detecting highly contagious pathogens with moderate mortality rates. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03/17/scie...

Well, that's fair; for a catastrophic outcome 1 in 3 are not odds you'd want to take. I thought "only" because I have a sense, based on conversations with other people, that the perception is that this particular virus was inevitably going to lead to a pandemic once it evolved. Instead, as you say, this opportunity probably arises all the time, and the dice were against us on this one. Which seems like a useful bit of perspective.

For the generic category, "Bat-human coronavirus zoonosis", people living around the bats in question appear to be infected pretty regularly. Probably happens often enough that "two thirds of zoonotic viruses in this category self-limit" is a massive, massive underestimate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005361...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2600275/

The paper itself is here https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03/17/scie...

The power of contingency. It's always been a huge factor in everything from cosmology to evolution. No surprise that pandemics are highly contingent events as well.

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