What happened to all the other viruses such as bird flu, west nile virus, sars, etc.? Did they all disappear? They all happened within the last twenty years or so, and I'm sure they still have the information of what occurred at that time yet I don't hear about anyone getting those viruses these days. Was there a cure discovered or did the last person to die from it not pass it on to anyone else and it died with them?
Swine flu has a vaccine that is included in the regular flu vaccine and isn’t very deadly.
During its outbreak 60 million in the US got it but just roughly 12,000 died. I think that’s like a .02 case mortality rate. So it’s basically like an additional flu, definitely level 1 of 5 on the pandemic severity index.
Ebola is extremely deadly. Like a 30% death rate. Folks in the Congo still struggle with this but our CDC is very active there, keeping it at bay. It’s not very transmissive because by the time a person becomes contagious, they are basically bed-ridden, and visibly sick so it’s easier to isolate those cases and prevent community spread.
sars is the most similar (hence this is sars cov 2)
similar symptoms.. with SARS 1 though..its more deadly (9 percent case mortality rate vs roughly 2%) but it did not have this weird asymptomatic incubation period where people who didn’t yet feel sick could pass the virus.
so it was
relatively easier to find those who were exposed by doing contact tracing on who was infected. With this, you don’t know who’s infected for a long period of time thus you can’t reliably determine who was exposed and you can’t trace the epidemiological connections well enough to stamp to it.
plus with sars cov 2, the timing has been bad so far. China had an initial outbreak during Chinese New Year where millions of people traveled home to visit family and then likely back to where ever they currently live. In the US we have an administration that uninvested in global infectious disease control and have not set up our national infrastructure to battle something like this.
Here is a good documentary on how the world responded to and stamped out Sars 1:
Here’s a vid of Bill Gates discussing what we would have to do to be ready for a pandemic 4 years ago..