Quote Originally Posted by LaxtonLad View Post
This hardly compares, BFP, no-ones life was being threatened by Brexit and we did have plenty of time to prepare for it.

For what it's worth I think this virus is only as dangerous as a new strain of flu, we get one of these every year and they will kill some but they are self-limiting. Viruses mutate, which is why we get we get new ones and why we need a new jab each year, last year's
has mutated into this year's and the old vaccine won't work. Too bad it's too late to innoculate now it's in the population.

Throwing money at the problem? Where do you throw it? The only action to take is to try and isolate outbreaks- easy, innit?

This from RationalWiki, it's about the survival problem of a virus on Noah's ark!

"Viruses pose a special problem. Most viruses are very host specific and cannot survive long without a host. Because their hosts develop immunity to a virus after infection, viruses require a large population of hosts to infect. To see what I mean, imagine a world with only eight people in it. One carries smallpox. He gets the disease. It spreads to the other seven people. They all have smallpox. But now that everyone has had it and survived (or not), there is no one else to infect. Unable to live without a host, the smallpox virus goes extinct. Nearly all viruses have this problem. They can only survive if the population is producing new hosts fast enough to keep the virus from extinction."
The director of the WHO (not Roger Daltry) said today that this virus is nothing like the flu. It’s early days, but transmission appears to be much easier and it kills a far bigger proportion(though still small) of the people it infects.

Of course viruses don’t want to kill 100% of the people they infect, but even if it stays at 1-2%, that’s still a massive public health crisis if it gets out of control.