Pandemic Official

[Dark Lord of the Bith]

Ah. Well, a case of mistaken translation. I meant...damn...the speed and ease of transmission? What's the actual English term?

That would be infectiousness.

[PainRack]

It will probably remain a "mild" pandemic for those of us in the first world countries who have reasonable access to medical facilities. Tough luck for people in developing countries, though.

I think one of the most disturbing things about this pandemic is not so much the pandemic itself, which may actually be relatively mild, but what it showed us about our containment measures. In short, this pandemic has proven that our containment measures are utterly worthless. Even with early warning and governmental action, it spread swiftly across the entire world. If it were a more deadly disease, we'd be looking at major reduction in global population.

If the next major disease is much deadlier, who knows what could happen? This has proven that we won't be able to contain its spread.

Wasn't one of the reasons why this is so is because the WHO and most countries decided that it was too difficult to contain the disease and moved towards mitigation and treatment instead?

[Bedlam]

Probably just a conspiricy theory thing but could it be that some governments decided to allow the virus to spread in its current form?

It doesn't seem to be very lethal at the moment although that may change in future and the mild form may provide protection against a later more lethal strain. Now no official could stand up and say "Ok people we're going to let this spread so that the majority get some immunity this means a minority are going to die but we think this is for the greater good" however, they could put extra blocks in place to slow things down and / or make containment less effective to have the same affect.

I'm not saying this is what has occured but it might have and if so it might even be better for the population as a whole although it would be a hard decission to make.

[PeZook]

Bollocks. If the virus mutates, no acquired immunity will work: why do you think flu vaccines have to be redeveloped every goddamned year?

Governments didn't take drastic measures because the only way to contain a virus is to institute curfews and travel restrictions, and that's expensive and annoys people. It's the exact same reason why we don't just alco-check every single car on the road one day and jail everyone caught drunk driving. Too expensive and too disruptive.

[Melchior]

A minor nitpick. Virulence and deadliness are synonymous in the dictionary.

They are not in epidemiology, on the other hand. People are generally speedily removed from the premises of the examination for that kind of error.
Virulence is a measure of the ability of a pathogen to establish a infection, against the various countermeasures taken by the host's immune system; it's usually measured in terms of "dose required to cause a infection in half of the test subjects". High virulence pathogens tend to be quicker in causing death, but deadliness is a different thing (a measure of the probability of a lethal outcome caused by a certain infection).
A very virulent infection can be completely asymptomatic and even innocuous.