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A Most Convenient Virus
By Dmitry Orlov
February 15, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
I prefer to write on things
I know about, but once in a while an opportunity
presents itself for me to comment on some aspect of
widespread mistrust and confusion while resting on a
solid foundation of my professional curiosity. This
is the case of the 2019-nCoV novel coronavirus. A
lot of the elements of the coronavirus story just
don’t add up, and that’s what I want to explore. At
the outset, I want to make it clear that I am no
expert on these matters. Is 2019-nCoV a genetically
engineered biological weapon or is it a naturally
evolved strain of a virus that is endemic in China’s
bat population? This we don’t know, but it is
interesting to look at the plausibility of each of
these scenarios and also to consider whether what we
are observing could be a combination of a little of
each.
As a biological weapon of mass destruction,
2019-nCoV isn’t particularly good. On the plus side,
it is highly contagious and can be spread by
infected individuals who are not showing any of the
symptoms, such as fever and shortness of breath. On
the minus side, the mortality rate is a mere 2.1%
and is likely to trend down because this rate does
not account for a potentially huge number of young,
healthy people who contracted the virus but never
developed any symptoms, were never tested for it,
and will never know that they had survived it. For a
virus to be potent as a bioweapon, its kill ratio
needs to be optimized for killing the largest
possible number of its victims, but doing so slowly
enough so that the victims don’t die before they
have a chance to spread the infection.
Another minus: the average age of those who succumb
to it is around 65, making it rather ineffective in
impairing the productive capacities of a nation, be
they industrial or military, since many of those who
die are past their peak productive years or retired.
In fact, taking a rather cynical view, this virus
could be rather helpful in reducing the burden of
economically unproductive sick an elderly people
who, in an aging Chinese population, and given the
respect Chinese society traditionally gives to its
elders, consume a growing share of the country’s
resources. |
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