Maybe I’m too cynical, but that’s what I got from it. The video way overstates the ease of DIY viral research and understates how tightly regulated it already is.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but that’s what I got from it. The video way overstates the ease of DIY viral research and understates how tightly regulated it already is.
Neither Ebola nor HIV spread through aerosolized particles, which is far and away the main transmission vector of COVID-19. They both only spread through direct bodily contact, so they were nowhere near as infectious.
Again, I don’t deny material conditions play a part, and also that if all humans just stood still it wouldn’t have spread. But it should be self-evident that the properties of COVID-19 were a key part of its success in spreading, and that those properties are encoded by such little information is all I was marvelling at.
Unfortunately, you are completely incorrect about ebola. It was a sheer miracle of fate Reston virus did not wipe America off the face of the earth in the 1990s. It is asymptomatic in humans - so far.
It would take minimal effort to either modify another virus in the ebola family to take on the airborne properties of Reston virus, or change the virulence in humans. I would not be surprised at all if that had already been done somewhere.
Huh? How am I “completely incorrect about Ebola”? It seems consensus that it spreads through direct contact. Is that not true?
If you’re arguing the Reston “ebolavirus” (which is not synonymous with “Ebola” as we know it, just as COVID-19 is a specific member of a large group of ‘coronavirus’) is more transmissive because it can be airborne, and if it was pathogenic to humans it’d be very dangerous. Then, like, we are saying the same thing.