I think I posted something like this before but here’s the concern outside of the 2% mortality rate, it’s new and it’s an RNA virus. Viruses adapt and evolve with their hosts, this virus isn’t suppose to have a human host, it should stay zoonotic. In the perfect world this virus replicates and transmits itself amongst the animal host population. It mutates at its normal rate and life goes on. During the natural course of replication that’s in the millions, combined with the mutation rate of a virus like this, the virus mutates its receptor to be able to bind a human cell receptor, glycan, membrane protein etc.. Now what rate this occurs is largely an unknown but assume extremely low, and then said infected animal never comes into contact with a human so this random mutation doesn’t matter, never gets passed in the host animal because it’s actually detrimental to normal host replication.
However the billion to one or whatever chance happens and this random chance mutation occurs and also happens to encounter a new host that it can now replicate in, that’s what you had happen here. It’s the concern with bird flu, the host receptor between human and birds for that virus is a change in the sialic acid receptor from alpha 2,3 to alpha 2,6 linkage it’s almost seems inconsequential but that simplistic change you will have pandemic flu.
So with all that said remember when people freaked out with Ebola, it wasn’t because at that time the transmission rate was extremely high compared to
A lot of viruses it was because there had never been sustain person to person transmission allowing the virus to continue to evolve in a human host. Same concept applies here, high mutation rate, new selective pressure from the human host, unknown outcome. It’s micro scale evolution happening in real time. The virus can go any which way, become as virulent as SARS and keep its transmission rate, become as attenuated as the common cold strains of Coronavirus, stay how it is now, more virulent less transmissible, and so on.
What the media is reporting isn’t wrong it’s just extremely complicated even to people you would consider educated, it’s how vaccine skeptics can arise from people you would otherwise consider intelligent. It also falls onto a group of people that are poor communicators in general to explain the concepts to reporters that then try to digest it into easily digestible sound bites. Overall for most people there’s really nothing you can do except normal health precautions like hand washing and such. No reason to panic but hopefully through conversations this country can realize we as a nation need to do better to prepare because the alarm has been sounding for years that a bad pandemic was going to happen sooner than later and if this isn’t it there will be on in the future.
