Comments on: MERS-CoV, The Haj, and the remote chance of a killer global pandemic

By: Deadly MERS may not become the next SARS pandemic | National Monitor

Deadly MERS may not become the next SARS pandemic | National Monitor — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 12:45:38 +0000

[…] MERS appears to be less virulent and not easily spread between humans, making it less likely to become a pandemic. However, it is […]

By: dean

dean — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 16:07:25 +0000

Losing 30% of the population today …

Surely the percentage would not have to reach this level before serious problems hit: with almost immediate communication now wouldn’t groups begin reacting badly by the time deaths hit 10%?

By: Eric Lund

Eric Lund — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 14:17:54 +0000

Nat @1: Death rates from infectious disease of around 90% were reported in some of the native populations in early 17th century New England. Plimoth Plantation was founded on the site of a native village that had been abandoned due to an unspecified plague a few years before the Pilgrims arrived.

That was a special circumstance: the people of the Americas had been isolated from a number of diseases to which surviving Eurasians had largely acquired resistance, so they fell in great numbers when they finally encountered those diseases. So it may be unlikely today. But I would not call it impossible. And as others point out above, our modern interconnected world is likely to break down in a pandemic with a mortality rate well short of 90%.

Ebola and its relatives tend to burn out because they are too virulent. Afflicted individuals don’t have much time to spread the virus to others before dying. But something that had a week or so for an incubation period before symptoms became apparent, and went on to kill a double-digit percentage of its victims, would be really nasty. Thanks to modern air travel, something like that could spread worldwide before anybody knew there was an epidemic.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 04:04:03 +0000

30%? Possibly way less. Every bite of food is at the end of a long supply line that is not set up to be redundant but is highly parallel. The market works very well with large swings in production, maybe up to that 30% range, in specific sectors. This year, British wheat is expected to be 20% off, which is a lot, but that’s doable because somewhere else will surely be 20% up, and if wheat prices go up there will be minor adjustments here and there to use other materials where possible.

But in a situation where everything goes down 10% and nothing goes up, and there is simply 10% less food …. well, at first that might be covered with reducing the easy to reduce waste, but over a three or four years of a global decrease in that range (say 5 to 10%) and a continued increase in population there would be large areas of starvation. That, in turn, would make a large percentage of the population much more vulnerable to disease. Starvation kills a lot of people but it never really kills those people; a deficit of energy makes them vulnerable to things that don’t normally kill.

Then, that in turn reduces the food supply because those people will be peasants in Thailand or whatever producing a big part of the world food supply . And so on.

Doom, we are.

The 2050 mark that is now being talked about for when supply will equal demand (peak food, as it were) is not so much the point where all the new babies grow up hungry from then on, but rather, when things like Arab Spring look like picnics.

By: Doug Alder

Doug Alder — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:11:47 +0000

@Minneapolis in the black death scenario it must be remembered that there was a much greater portion of the population that were, relatively speaking, much more self-sufficient than first world populations are today. Losing 30% of the population today could easily bring about the mass starvation Greg mentions, as transportation, storage and food production networks break down. A similarly virulent pestilence today will take out much more than 30% of the population in 1st world countries as well as the crowded cities of developing nations.

By: jsm1031

jsm1031 — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 18:17:18 +0000

David Quammen does a good job, IMHO, with last years book Spillover in exploring the jump from animal world to human. We have been extremely lucky thus far, and you are right – we are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 15:33:34 +0000

All good questions. I tend to think that starvation plus disease is the nightmare scenario.

By: Nat

Nat — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 15:28:03 +0000

This is my doomsday nightmare, and it’s a broader cultural one as well, having replaced a broad US-USSR nuclear exchange as end-of-the-world material. What I find interesting is how the threat of mortality gets exaggerated in fictional versions of the pandemic. The worst pandemics in recorded history do not reduce broad populations by 50%: even the Black Death, the most infamous pandemic ever, had a net mortality in Europe of around 1/3. Science fiction pandemics generally look for mortailty rates around 90% like Ebola.

What level of mortality actually entails a noticeable level of societal collapse? Does mortailty affect the virus’s global spreadability? Ebola’s tendency to burn itself out suggests this. How realistic are the nightmares of Twelve Monkeys, 30 Days, that Wired Magazine scenario… all the nightmares that haunt me, in short?