Eh, actually I think the human element is the one big thing the movie got totally wrong. Like 50% of Americans think COVID is just the flu. In Contagion, the Jude Law character peddles conspiracy buillshit on some youtube channel, in real life, the president of the US is doing that. I posted about this before, but in Contagion the crazy armed thugs break into Lawrence Fishburne’s house demanding to be given the CDC’s vaccine, IRL these guys will be out parading against any kind of vaccination. MAGA chuds running around trying to live their normal lives is one thing the movie didn’t anticipate.
Well, absolutely nothing is as contagious as measles. We’re not lucky there, measles is like some crazy-ass virus dreamed up in a sci-fi movie. Probably we’re lucky that this wasn’t SARS2? But also, the more lethal the disease is, the more we humans put up a stronger host response. One could imagine that if COVID19 was more lethal, there would be a bigger push to stop it. If you’ve ever played Plague Inc., you know that the winning strategy is to fly under everyone’s radar for as long as possible.
Yea Covid fell in that sweet spot where morons can herp derp it’s the flu while smart people are like oh shit this is bad. And there are a lot more morons than smart people.
Have you guys heard of this guy Maurice Hilleman. He sounds like kind of an asshole, but goddamn,
After joining E.R. Squibb & Sons (now Bristol-Myers Squibb), Hilleman developed a vaccine against Japanese B encephalitis, a disease that threatened American troops in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II. As chief of the Department of Respiratory Diseases at Army Medical Center (now the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research) from 1948 to 1957, Hilleman discovered the genetic changes that occur when the influenza virus mutates, known as shift and drift, which he theorized would mean that a yearly influenza vaccination would be required.[9] That helped him to recognize that a 1957 outbreak of influenza in Hong Kong could become a huge pandemic. Working on a hunch, after nine 14-hour days he and a colleague found that it was a new strain of flu that could kill millions.[ citation needed ] Forty million doses of vaccines were prepared and distributed. Although 69,000 Americans died, the pandemic could have resulted in many more deaths in the United States. Hilleman was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal from the American military for his work.
In 1957, Hilleman joined Merck & Co. (Kenilworth, New Jersey), as head of its new virus and cell biology research department in West Point, Pennsylvania. It was while with Merck that Hilleman developed most of the forty experimental and licensed animal and human vaccines with which he is credited, working both at the laboratory bench as well as providing scientific leadership.
In 1963, his daughter Jeryl Lynn came down with the mumps. He cultivated material from her, and used it as the basis of a mumps vaccine. The Jeryl Lynn strain of the mumps vaccine is still used today. The strain is currently used in the trivalent (measles, mumps and rubella) MMR vaccine that he also developed, the first vaccine ever approved incorporating multiple live virus strains
Also, there’s this shit:
Like many other vaccines and medications of that time period, the vaccine was initially tested in kids with intellectual disabilities
UHHHHHHHHHH. I don’t like this one bit! Goddamn, the history of immunology is chock full of Nazi bullshit.
I agree, especially with the last sentence. But the mortality rate in the movie was 25-30%, which accounts for a lot of that. And expecting them to predict Trump in 2013… I can’t hold that against them.
I mean the sweet spot for mass casualties would be similar to the movie. R0 and mortality rate both higher than COVID-19. A higher mortality rate alone and we probably get more shutdowns. Although if this was 5% instead of ~1%, who knows?
The way they’ve defined it there (in that article specifically), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to categorize immunity as a subset of resistance mechanisms. So if you’re immune, you’re resistant. But you can be resistant without being immune.
And of course, immunity would be separate from tolerance.
I haven’t seen Contagion, but I guess if the criticism is that it is inaccurate to be using “immune” to describe his lack of sickness when exposed, then I’d agree with that. To be “immune” his immune system would have to have seen it before in some form (vaccine, prior infection, similar infection). In the absence of those things, it would be more accurate to say he was resistant or tolerant.
This is a big challenge for football, because meetings throughout the day break out by position group. As a result, losing 20% of your roster for a month to COVID-19 probably doesn’t mean losing a WR, a TE, two OL, two DL, a LB, and three DBs. It probably means losing 7 OL and 3 DL or something like that, and most teams only carry 7-8 offensive lineman. It’d be virtually impossible to win with 5 offensive lineman off the street, and it’d be franchise malpractice to put a franchise QB out there behind 5 offensive lineman off the street.
I don’t know how they avoid this. It’s going to happen to someone. If I were an NFL GM, I’d have a backup QB in total isolation, working out and practicing with a couple coaches that are also in total isolation. My entire practice squad would be offensive and defensive lineman, and I’d also isolate them from the rest of the team.
I’m surprised it took this long, and surprised they’ve managed to avoid it with offensive/defensive linemen.
This is something I’ll never understand. The NFL has basically unlimited money. Why not have family in a bubble at a hotel resort along with the players. It worked for the NBA and NHL. Like, c’mon. You telling me the NFL and Disney couldn’t come up with a partnership in Orlando like the NBA did?
I’ve been saying this for months to my friends too. The consensus is a combination of the owners not wanting to spend the money and the players not wanting to be under that level of lockdown.
Basically in terms of caring about death/suffering in this country, we’re the weird ones.
[quote=“Melkerson, post:7713, topic:2623”]
I haven’t seen Contagion[/quote]
WAT? Such a great and topical movie, you have to watch it.
Yeah, I think this is the thing. The Mat Damon character hasn’t built up an adaptive immune response but also is resistant/tolerant to the disease (not sure what the correct terminology here is!).
The classic is malaria. If you have one allele of the sickle cell trait your a resistant to infection and do not suffer anemia. (If you have two you are malaria resistant but you do suffer sc anemia). If you have two “normal” alleles that you are susceptible.
We are absolutely fucked when the next one goes down, especially if its similarly fatal and soonish in transmission. If we get a vaccine for Covid and a year and a half from then a new corona shows up with a 2.5% fatality rate, there is 0 chance anyone in power forces a lockdown.
The next major outbreak will likely kill multiple millions without anyone batting an eye.
Yeah, that’s an obvious example and was in the link that Trolly posted.
What I’d be really interested in is a disease in which some people are immune and others are resistant or tolerant. This is apparently what was depicted in the movie (which once again, I haven’t seen).