Im talking worst case scenario, something like Station 11 or the movie Contagion
If the bird flu started spreading rapidly from human to human, and it devastated our population as it can in birds or marine life, how long would one have to hole up in seclusion before the virus burned through the population and it would probably be safe to come out.
Obviously, this is not the current situation, and this scenario is a long way from becoming any type of reality. This is just a hypothetical. If turds hit the fan, I dont want to waste time trying to figure this out in the moment while everyone’s ill, and can’t answer.
Move over B’s, I want first dibs on the tp!
Edit: I’m not thinking of a flu, as it behaves in the human population as we know it. I’m talking like zombie virus, without the worry of reanimation. Like, pretty much, everyone that catches it, dies, and it spreads fast and stealthily enough that the end result is a drastically lower population of survivors. How long would a person have to stay isolated to outlive the worst of it.
I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that we had an epidemic and a huge amount of people just straight up refused to believe it was real.
People wouldn’t quarantine and it would never actually go away.
It’s totally unfair to judge humanity on just one pandemic when people refuse to wear masks and quarantine. We should also look at the 1918 pandemic.
True, that’s two pandemics when people refused to wear masks and quarantine. Makes for much better data to include that. Thanks!
No, definitely people wouldnt quarantine like that. But, H5N1 can have a really high mortality rate. From what I can tell, a near 100%. for birds and some marine mammals. I.e. every animal that catches it, dies.
Not to be macabre, but I don’t mean how long would people have to quarantine to beat back the virus. Im asking how long would an individual have to hide from everyone else, before everyone else, who refused to believe it was real, and whatnot, caught the virus and just…died.
Mortality rate has an inverse correlation to infection rate. So I would guess a really long time. Depending on infection vectors, maybe it could burn through dense population centers quickly. But anywhere rural it could come by whenever, it would be impossible to predict.
If the government provides living expenses, as long as it takes. If it provides less than one month’s living expenses over an 18 month period, you don’t need to quarantine at all, dying will be cheaper.
Safe is relative. Do you go out right now? Do you trust your (assumed) covid vaccination to protect you?
Ask yourself what level of risk you’re willing to accept. “I need a vaccine to be widely adopted” or “i need to be more likely to die/have complications from X other thing”. Better yet, “If i get infected i’m this likely to spread the disease further”. Your risk tolerance is never zero and neither is your risk to others.
If everyone goes in lockdown a few weeks should suffice but that’s the ideal scenario. Containment and immobility are the best ways to smother an outbreak.
It would be much longer, based on 2020. There’s always idiots breaking quarantine.
COVID could have been eliminated if people stayed home for a couple of weeks in March/April 2020. Now COVID is permanent.
Exact. Quarantine only works when we all participate.
Vaccine development would probably be quicker than the ones made for Covid as we already have vaccines for other strains of flu. Maybe up to a year?
The R number of flu is much lower than Covid so the waves of cases would rise and fall slower, leading to longer isolation periods during wave peaks. Masking and lockdowns would be more effective against flu so the political reality of implementing that would be a large factor in how it plays out.
We killed off one strain of flu by our less-than-perfect quarantining for COVID. If we mask up for Texas Moo Flu, we’d stop spreading COVID around so much and might slow down its mutation too. At least with flu we know how it’s transmitted, and have related vaccines to tweak. Maybe we’ll be able to call off the Return To Workplace bullshit, too.
We killed off one strain of flu by our less-than-perfect quarantining for COVID.
We did? Do you have more information on that?
I prefer Houstonian butt COVID
That’s pretty cool! I knew we didn’t really have a flu season, but I didn’t realize we actually killed off a while strain. Not for nothing, I guess.
You do have a point though, we have an existing vaccine and we are more knowledgeable about the flu in general. Maybe there would be more surviviors than one would anticipate. As long as the scientists didn’t dont get infected and die before they could get the vaccine out.
When birds catch the bird flu, there can be up to 100% mortality rate. So, I suppose I’m more refering to a catastrophic, civilization altering illness. More akin the what a zombie virus would do, without the added potential of reanimation.
Some people do actually need to physically be at work… in fact, it’s how most work is done. Just because some are devs/IT workers and see no need to actually show up to work, that doesn’t mean the rest of the world keeps on turning without maintenance.
It’s not just Devs. It’s essentially any office job.
Accountants or lawyers don’t need to be in the same building anymore than Devs do.
Basically, a fraction of the intellectual workforce. Everyone else has to: medical professionals, carpenters, builders, civil engineers, electrical engineers, server hardware maintenance staff (in some cases, also the IT personel’s job), plumbers, clerks, social workders, barternders… there’s a lot more that need to actually show up for work.
But no one is talking about them.
Returning to work refers to people who left work lol
It doesn’t make any sense to mention these people in a discussion about return to work.
As long as the public health officials in your area tell you to.
But in the situation in imagining, they would all be dead. I’d be stuck there indefinitely!
But you do have a point. Im sure the public health officials in my area would tell everyone that there’s nothing to worry about and to go get infected for fun. :/ guess I’d be the only one left, granted I stay inside long enough to outlive all the infected.
