| > Something we can all be thankful for. It should be noted that SARS didn’t cause a pandemic, either. Well no, but we didn't know it wouldn't at the time, of course. Which isn't really the point. TFA's argument only makes objective sense in hindsight - after many missed opportunities, bungling, false starts, etc have manifested. That TFA only points this out after all these mistakes are made and the costs are being borne is a truism, not an astute observation. > ... the notion of a less deadly but more easily transmitted form of Ebola is a lot scarier than what we ended up with ... I totally disagree. Ebola, as mentioned earlier, is sufficiently brutal, and known to be so, that it takes itself out of circulation relatively quickly and scares the living shinola out of the candidate carriers, so it dies out really quickly. COVID19 OTOH has yet to be really experienced by most people, directly or indirectly, so the 20+ day incubation, and weird claims of mild flu-like and other misdirections are in its favour. (Excuse implicit anthropomorphism.) And if we want to talk about something less deadly than Ebola, it's a very crowded field. AFAICT Ebola's officially taken < 20,000 people (I may be wildly wrong here - it's hard to find good numbers). SARS-CoV-2 has (as of 2020-05-05) already taken an order of magnitude more than that - 252,000, and that's likely an under-estimate. |