Living in interesting times

[Denyer]

On a cheerful note, connecting with colossal ice melts...

Long-Dormant Viruses Are Now Waking Up After 50,000 Years as Planet Warms
https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/1 ... anet-warms

"A heat wave in Siberia in the summer of 2016 activated anthrax spores, leading to dozens of infections, killing a child and thousands of reindeer. In July this year, a separate team of scientists published findings showing that even multicellular organisms could survive permafrost conditions in an inactive metabolic state, called cryptobiosis. They successfully reanimated a 46,000-year-old roundworm from the Siberian permafrost, just by re-hydrating it."

Mainly interesting for this comment, which I'm quoting to bookmark. Of course it remains to be seen how current and future developments with covid affect lifespan. And how possible Typhoid Mary type carriers factor into the spread of pathogens, although there's already evidence that variants are likely to result in conditions such as weakened immune systems that host viruses longer term without being able to fight them off.

Going all out, it took a year to develop a vaccine for COVID and another year before the world wasn't production-limited. Modern medicine isn't a miracle. Indeed, we were fortunate that a lot of the groundwork for targeting the spike protein had already been done (for example, normally you can't have it isolated off the nucleocapsid as it folds into its fusion state, and even if that weren't the case, you wouldn't want it to be capable of going into its fusion state, as you don't want to risk syncytia; research had already found that you could "splint" it permanently into a non-fused state with double proline substitution).

I'm honestly a lot MORE concerned after I saw what happened with COVID. Take an example: imagine if HIV had been a highly contageous airborne disease like COVID rather than a STD. How would we have reacted?

When you first contract HIV, most people get symptoms like a bad case of the flu (not all that dissimilar to COVID). Then it subsides, and people feel fine. Had it it been highly contageous and airborne, we would have seen massive waves of flu-like illness sweeping through the non-resistant population, killing some of the vulnerable. We would have responded like we did to COVID, while starting to research it.

What would research have found? First, nothing. It's quite hard to detect latent HIV infection, esp. shortly after a person has been infected. Even when discovered, it doesn't seem to be doing much of anything. People would have debated (like they still do to this day debate with COVID) whether long-term latent infection is a thing, or whether you're just looking at inactive remnants of the virus from the infection. Even when it became clear that it's a latent infection, would people have freaked out? We have all sorts of latent infections, from cold sores to chickenpox to Epstein-Barr, and we don't freak out about them so long as they don't seem to be doing anything. A very small percentage of the population might rapidly accelerate to AIDS, but it probably would have been seen as a rare side effect of infection in vulnerable individuals (like, say, MIS-C).

How would society have responded? Probably pretty much the same way as with COVID.

"I NEED A HAIRCUT!"
"STOP TAKING OUR FREEDOM!"
"IT'S JUST THE FLU!"
"STOP LIVING IN FEAR!"
"I HAVE AN IMMUNE SYSTEM!"
"OPEN UP!"

And politicians, sooner or later, some places earlier than others, would have bowed to pressure to open up. Remember that with COVID, places some started opening back up as early as late spring / early summer 2020, like a third of a year into the pandemic, half a year at worst, when almost nothing was known about it. And a bit over a year in, tons of places opened fully or near fully. Would it have been any different in an "airborne HIV" situation, as per the above?

And then what would have happened? Almost the entire planet would end up with HIV, and when people start coming down with AIDS en masse, progress toward treatment would be minimal at best. In short: it'd be a veritable apocalypse.

Seeing human behavior in this pandemic does NOT fill me with confidence about future pandemics. Which can be expected to occur more and more often as global transportation increases and people push into ever-more remote areas - let alone if we start unintentionally resurrecting past viral threats.