Covid vs Hantavirus
- Fred
- May 11
- 4 min read
Back in January of 2020, there was a virus sending panic through China.
Using the prism of time, we now know that virus was the first variation of Covid-19. What made Covid so scary? Initial reports indicated a mortality rate of around 5%. For those bad at math, that's 1 in 20 deaths.
A 1 in 20 death rate stretches the health care system to the brink. Talk to someone in healthcare today and they'll tell you that, between 2020 and 2022, Covid decimated the hospital workforce. Wave after wave of health care professionals quit or retired as each ensuing strain burned through the country.
Covid killed over a million Americans, but instead of sympathy, many Americans, specifically Libertarians, claimed those people were old and sick and would have died anyway.
Listen, my day job is at the local school district and there's a small grain of truth in that argument. In a city of 30,000, Covid killed exactly ZERO children in our district.
My argument is now, the same as it was then: 1,000,000 dead Americans is still serious business.
But if you run the numbers posthumously, Covid didn't kill Americans at a 5% rate, but a .4% rate.
.4% is 1 in 250, not 1 in 20. And, more likely than not, statistically, that one was an 80 year old in the local nursing home.
Why are we revisiting Covid?
This meme was at the local Libertarian website earlier today:
In the past week, I've seen Libertarians sounding the alarm:
WE WON'T WEAR MASKS AGAIN!
WE WON'T CLOSE BUSINESSES AGAIN!
WE WON'T LET THE GOVERNMENT INFRINGE ON OUR RIGHTS AGAIN!
Oh, don't worry fuckers, if hantavirus catches fire, no rules for anyone. It's a hard reset, we start again like Lord of the Flies.
How do I figure? Right now, hantavirus' mortality rate is around 35%. For those bad at math, that's a hair more than 1 in 3 deaths.
If 1 in 3 holds, society will collapse.
Why am I not freaking out?
Back in 1994, Richard Preston scared the hell out of Americans when he wrote about the Ebola Virus in the best-selling book The Hot Zone. At the time, Ebola would spring up in a small African Village, kill about 60% of the residents, then disappear.
And Ebola was gruesome, once you got it, bleeding from every orifice and you were usually dead within 48 hours.
But Ebola was actually kind of hard to catch, basic precautions, like wearing gloves or washing your hands, prevented its spread. Ebola was not airborne, but bloodborne. In Africa, where there was often no sanitation or clean water, Ebola was nearly impossible to treat.
In patients from Africa that have been treated in America, the survival rate was much better with adequate rehydration methods.
Now don't get me wrong, Ebola still sucked to contract, but it took a lot of resources to successfully treat a single case.
It appears that the hantavirus on the cruise ship off of the coast of Argentina is spread not rodent to human, but human to human. Now that's dangerous, but it doesn't appear to be airborne. If this strain of hantavirus mutates, though, it is possible that it loses some of its virality.
If hantavirus becomes airborne and keeps its virality, we are looking at an extinction level event. If hantavirus starts killing kids at the same ratios as adults, modern systems will shut down.
That's the way the apocalypse started in the Stephen King (fictional) novel The Stand. But in The Stand, the mortality rate was 99.4%.
In real life, what percentage unravels Western Civilization in a pandemic level event?
Oh, 10-12%.
We saw it begin to happen with Covid. Front line workers got sick, white collar workers worked from home, and the rich hid behind walls. Oprah Winfrey didn't leave her house for a year. Radio personality Howard Stern famously didn't leave his house for 2.5 years. Once kids start to die in a future hypothetical event, schools everywhere will shut down and everything goes online.
But grocery stores have to stay open....right?
Gas stations?
Police stations?
Hospitals?
If hospitals are overrun and staff simply die or quit, what do you do then?
Do you continue to pay workers until they use up their banked sick time?
When people start to die across all age groups, we'll see if Libertarians will still have the "let the virus burn through the population" attitude.
Water needs to stay on.
Gas needs to stay on.
Electricity needs to stay on....
What's my prediction? This hantavirus outbreak will burn itself out in a few weeks.
Like the Ebola outbreak in Guinea in 2016.
Or DR Congo in 2018.
Or DR Congo in 2020.
Or DR Congo in 2021.
Or Guinea in 2021.
Or Uganda in 2022.
Or Uganda in 2025.
Or DR Congo in 2025.
Hmm, maybe I'm not so confident after all....
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