Saturday 29 March 2003

Pic of the day: From the anime Kanon. Sorry, but it was really hard to come up with a good illustration.

SARS so far

Looking at the newspaper headlines, I notice a lack of perspective. Yes, the war in Iraq is quite exciting; but the new pandemic is much more important. Besides, it is quite likely to decide the war.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has spread to Beijing. Despite all economic progress lately, China is still a borderline developing country. It simply does not have the resources and the education level to handle an epidemic of this scope, I'm afraid. And if the disease spreads there, it will not be possible to contain.

***

It seems the virus has now been identified as a corona-virus. The bad news are that there is no cure for this type of virus, except the body's own immune system. (The only native human corona-virus is a common cold, so not much work has been put into finding a cure, either.) The good news are that with proper care, mortality is fairly low ... current estimates are around 4% of the patients die. (It is hard to get exact numbers as many patients are still in serious condition and could go either way.)

If SARS becomes a global pandemic, it is a good bet that the death toll will be higher, especially among the 80% of world population that live in poverty. On the other hand, some may live so isolated that the contagion never reaches them. So let us optimistically put the mortality at 4% (ignoring even the probability that hospitals may not have capacity to treat that many patients at once). Well, 4% of the world's population would be 240 million human lives. That's more than the entire population of Iraq by far. Since about 80% have been actually cured so far, the upper limit would seem to be around 1.2 billion. On the bright side, most of the world's population is young, and the disease seems to turn serious mostly on those over 40.

Even if you don't die, you still come down with high fever and breathing problems. If the disease spreads through an army, it will no longer be able to fight. At best an orderly retreat is possible if a decision is made early enough. If one army gets it before their opponent, they have basically lost.

***

This is not like AIDS, which spreads at a snail's pace. Hospitals will be overflowing with patients; shops will close spontaneously. In the first cities to be hits, schools are already closed. It may be a good idea to have a small cache of easy-to-make food at home, and perhaps some drinking water just in case.

I am not expecting society to break down, but I think some inconvenience is to be expected at least. The virus is still inexperienced with humans, and could mutate further. Usually a virus becomes less aggressive as it gets used to a new species, but this takes a while.

How long time we have before the storm hits, depends partly on how seriously we take the threat now. If the disease spreads slowly, hospital treatment will be available at least for much of the time; medical supplies will not run out; there will be time to look for weaknesses in the virus toward known and experimental drugs ... maybe even a vaccine. But if it spreads like wildfire, it is basically each man for himself. In that case, we may not remember 2003 as "the year of the Iraq war" after all.