Ye gods but those corona-viruses are dense and full of rapidly mutating RNA.

Cold, flu, SARS…what’s next from them?

Makes me glad to be a stay at home telecommuter, minimizes contact with other, possibly infected, hairless apes.

December 3, 2003 @ 5:59 am | Comment

These predictions aren’t new … when SARS came along, everybody thought “this is the big one” and started responding accordingly … but in the end, it wasn’t … in terms of numbers infected and killed, it was a wet firecracker. Sooner or later a really bad one is going to appear, and there is a fair chance it will come out of China or some other country where there is massive abuse of antibiotics etc. While the Chinese government eventually responded in the right way to SARS after 2 false starts, I’m concerned that the leadership may have learnt a false lesson … that the numbers effected didn’t justify the social and economic damage that publicising it caused. Next time I won’t be at all surprised to see them deny the problem and pretend it doesn’t exist … and ironically, the worse the outbreak, the greater the chance of public panic, and hence the greater the chance of the government seeking to cover it up …

(My personal opinion about the reason they had to “come clean” twice is that the first time the higher authorities really were admitting what they thought was the true extent of the problem. Only later did they discover that their subordinate officials hadn’t been accurately reporting what was happening, in time-honoured Chinese fashion. – any thoughts on this theory?)

December 3, 2003 @ 11:52 am | Comment