Coronavirus Terrorism

[Alex_Krycek]

16 hours ago, Airbrush said:

Also, what about "misery likes company?"  When some unhinged person gets the Coronavirus, they think "Well I have it, now everybody else should suffer thru this with me."  Therefore that one person, who hates society in general, does their best to spread Coronavirus everywhere !

 

There are some Super Spreaders like that in my neighborhood.  One guy the other day sneezed so fervently without covering his mouth that I was forced to cross to the other side of the street to avoid the invisible cloud of microorganisms that had been emitted.  Just ignorance and lack of consideration.  

[Carrock]

6 hours ago, iNow said:

Their Venns overlap, but not 100%
 

Somewhat too simplistic to be helpful?

Perhaps I'm being a hypochondriac, but I'm rather concerned that every time I run for a bus in inclement weather I come down with all the symptoms of coronavirus.

[Sensei]

18 hours ago, CharonY said:

Well, if you wanted to actually kill someone with the coronavirus you'd have to try to sneak into homes for the elderly to be efficient.

...you should know pretty good it is not necessary... bioterrorist can just infect anybody and they will unaware spread it further to elders.. Such unaware infected person without any symptoms is the most dangerous..

Bioterrorism is not novel. It was used in ancient and medieval times. During castle siege parts of infected meat were catapulted to inside and its crew had to surrender or die from illness.

Poisoning of arrows, rivers or wells are another examples of bioterrorism.

I am quite surprised that part of you simply started mocking from Airbrush. It is serious hypothetical problem. Even if something like this would happen it won't be possible to figure it out after the fact. No evidence will remain after the fact it was made on purpose. Terrorists don't want just to kill as many people as they can. It is easy part. They want people to be afraid of losing life in some spectacular unexpected event. Something which will be in newspapers. So they are picking methods which will be on frontpages. Casualties are not priority.

Edited March 13, 2020 by Sensei

[dimreepr]

1 minute ago, Sensei said:

...you should know pretty good it is not necessary... bioterrorist can just infect anybody and they will unaware spread it further to elders.. Such unaware infected person without any symptoms is the most dangerous..

Bioterrorism is not novel. It was used in ancient and medieval times. During castle siege parts of infected meat were catapulted to insude and its crew had to surrender or die from illness.

Poisoning arrows, rivers or wells are another examples of bioterrorism.

I am quite surprised that part of you simply started mocking from Airbrush. It is serious hypothetical problem. Even if something like this would happen it won't be possible to figure it out after the fact. No evidence will remain after the fact it was made on purpose. Terrorists don't want just to kill as many people as they can. It is easy part. They want people to be afraid of losing life in some spectacular unexpected event. Something which will be in newspapers. So they are picking methods which will be on frontpages. Casualties are not priority.

 I also think we should take this a little more seriously, after all can you imagine a more efficient way to bring low/terrorise the values of the West? 

Whilst I don't want to invent a whole new conspiracy theory, imagine if China wanted to jump to #1 in one quick stride and a new virus lands in their lap? 😊 

[zapatos]

I don't find it terrorizing that I may get COVID-19 from a terrorist when I can just as easily get it from anyone in the grocery store. That is akin to trying to scare soldiers by trying to shoot the soldiers who are already on the battlefield.

Maybe if they started infecting people with ebola...

[CharonY]

42 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I also think we should take this a little more seriously, after all can you imagine a more efficient way to bring low/terrorise the values of the West? 

Historically bioterrorism has been very unsuccessful (a large scale food poisoning was the most known even, but even that is dwarfed by "regular" food poisoning events) . And even so, regular outbreaks have had higher impact than human designed ones. As whole bioweapons are difficult to implement, near impossible to control often inefficient compared to chemical or nuclear warfare. What it is efficient in, however, is having reasonable doomsday (or equivalent) scenarios. Undetectable spread high but delayed mortality, for example. 

There are oodles of novels around of terrorist groups creating designer pathogens for their purposes, but technically it is very difficult and more often than not a crapshot. There is the fear that they are easy to isolate and spread. But, as noted, common spread is often on a far larger scale than a group can orchestrate. So what about state actors then? Well, here the issue how are they going to control it (and what benefit would it have?). 

It is not total fantasy, of course, and there us bioterrerrorism research and prevention in place. At the same time we see that in a globalized world diseases spread at a much larger speed that we are accustomed of. So given that COVID-19 is around and possible join the ranks of circulating diseases such as influenza I am not sure what the bioweapon potential would be here. A more systematic (but slower way) to erode public health is to boost antivaxxer campaigns and otherwise reduce public preparedness.

At this point I would take bets that these would end up in more fatalities in the event of a natural outbreak than what folks would achieve by actively trying to implement a doomsday scenario.

44 minutes ago, Sensei said:

...you should know pretty good it is not necessary... bioterrorist can just infect anybody and they will unaware spread it further to elders.. Such unaware infected person without any symptoms is the most dangerous..

And how is it different impact-wise from what is happening right now? Also note that for this disease asymptomatic spreading is very rare. There seems to be an overall correlation of spread and severity of symptoms. But of course there are plenty of (younger in this case it seems) that don't care too much about a little cough.

By overall point though is that while it is always more frightening to thing in terms of an intelligent driver to some crisis, the truth is that there are plenty potential catastrophes around that can and will occur eventually (even just regarding disease think climate-change driven rise of diseases, demise of antibiotics etc.) that will likely to be more impactful than most bioterrorism scenarios. While I am not saying it is a zero-sum game, I do feel an imbalance in terms of risk and how afraid folks are about a given scenario. 

[dimreepr]

3 minutes ago, CharonY said:

At this point I would take bets that these would end up in more fatalities in the event of a natural outbreak than what folks would achieve by actively trying to implement a doomsday scenario.

That was my point, but we do have to consider the lack of a world-wide /cooperative strategy is a threat.

[CharonY]

Just now, dimreepr said:

That was my point, but we do have to consider the lack of a world-wide /cooperative strategy is a threat.

That is indeed a cause for concern. And to me, nationalism and unilateralism are going to make things worse.

13 hours ago, iNow said:

Their Venns overlap, but not 100%

It should be noted that the graphs are specifically to spread awareness regarding COVID-19. Coronavirus while all respiratory (to my knowledge) can have different suites of symptoms. The discussion with cold is complicated by the fact as it is not a specific disease  (as e.g. COVID-19) but rather a descriptor of symptoms that can  be caused by a number of viruses and some of them belong to the family of coronaviruses. A number are endemic and responsible for a significant fraction of upper respiratory infections. Up until SARS, they were considered mostly harmless and often symptoms would fall under the "cold" bracket. 

[iNow]

9 hours ago, Carrock said:

Somewhat too simplistic to be helpful?

What better option do you recommend? Absent a formal test from a physician m, generic lists of symptoms is sort of the best we’ve got 

[StringJunky]

8 minutes ago, iNow said:

What better option do you recommend? Absent a formal test from a physician m, generic lists of symptoms is sort of the best we’ve got 

Chronic coughing  would seem the most concerning.

[MigL]

4 hours ago, Sensei said:

Bioterrorism is not novel. It was used in ancient and medieval times. During castle siege parts of infected meat were catapulted to inside and its crew had to surrender or die from illness.

I believe it was Caffa, on the Black Sea, where Mongol army besieged the inhabitants, and Venetian traders, on or about 1350, catapulting dead corpses and rats over the city walls. When the Venetians were finally able to make a break for it, they sailed west and docked in southern Italy.
Within months Bubonic Plague had spread to most of Italy, and within years, to the rest of Europe.
It is estimated that with the additional flare ups over the next century, the Black Death wiped out over a third of Europe''s population.

Edited March 13, 2020 by MigL

[Curious layman]

8 minutes ago, MigL said:

I believe it was Caffa, on the Black Sea, where Mongol army besieged the inhabitants, and Venetian traders, on or about 1350, catapulting dead corpses and rats over the city walls. When the Venetians were finally able to make a break for it, they sailed west and docked in southern Italy.
Within months Bubonic Plague had spread to most of Italy, and within years, to the rest of Europe.
It is estimated that with the additional flare ups over the next century, the Black Death wiped out over a third of Europe''s population.

Fuck, that's fascinating and slightly terrifying at the same time.

[CharonY]

2 hours ago, MigL said:

I believe it was Caffa, on the Black Sea, where Mongol army besieged the inhabitants, and Venetian traders, on or about 1350, catapulting dead corpses and rats over the city walls. When the Venetians were finally able to make a break for it, they sailed west and docked in southern Italy.
Within months Bubonic Plague had spread to most of Italy, and within years, to the rest of Europe.
It is estimated that with the additional flare ups over the next century, the Black Death wiped out over a third of Europe''s population.

Note that the spread was predominantly along trade routes. While there is decent evidence supporting the use of (black plague) bodies (which, btw. were already spreading in Asia and the Middle East), the entry of the plague was likely independent of that (or it may have contributed it, but was not the major driver).

The narrative of the use of cadavers and the spread of the bubonic plague to Europe following the the siege of Caffa  was strongly based on the account by Gabriele de' Mussi. Historians disagree whether he was actually physically present during the siege, but it appears that they think it is at least plausible that cadavers were hurled into the city. There is also the possibility that the plague arrived with the army and was subsequent transmitted by rodents, but despite overall uncertainties it is (from what I have read) not the favoured explanation. In the accounts de' Mussi also said that those escaped from Caffa were bound to Genoa Venice and so on and thereby spread the disease.

However that clashes with what I think is now fairly well established understanding how the plague spread into Europe. It is well established that the plague spread over the Crimea, but cases in Genoa and Venice appeared well over 2 years after the siege of Caffa. Since even under unfavourable conditions the voyage should have not taken more than a few months, the timeline does not line up well. Another aspect that even if that timeline would have worked out, the time required would still have resulted in a substantial outbreak on the ships themselves. But again, around that time, there were no records of something that must have been considered to be a significant event.

There are also folks who dispute that corpses were used in the first place (as there are no reports from folks fleeing from Caffa describing it aside from de' Mussi's account) or that there is no indication that it was knowingly used as a bioweapon (some dispute that bodies would be effective, they should have flung rats instead...). There is for example the speculation that the plague may have entered Caffa via the waterways. The Mongols were not able to fully block those and this where Caffa was getting resupplied.

Also historians report that a step-wise entry of the plague into Europe is more likely which makes a spread over trade routes via Crimean ports even more likely. Well established reports pinpoint spring 1347 as the start of the plague in Constantinople, for example.

I.e. there are quite a few reports that contradict the strong narrative of warfare-mediated spread, which is quite fascinating actually as not only historians have been working on it, but also epidemiologists and microbiologist, who use the documents to establish timelines and spread, not dissimilar to modern epi-studies (just with scarcer data). What is rather neat is that a fairly recent PNAS paper actually described genome evolution in Yersinia pestis which is consistent with repeated introduction via migratory and trading routes.

 

 

[Alex_Krycek]

15 hours ago, dimreepr said:

 I also think we should take this a little more seriously, after all can you imagine a more efficient way to bring low/terrorise the values of the West? 

Cyberwarfare is infinitely more efficient, which is why it is their preferred course of action.  COVID-19 is pure chaos for all countries involved.

Quote

Whilst I don't want to invent a whole new conspiracy theory, imagine if China wanted to jump to #1 in one quick stride and a new virus lands in their lap? 😊 

Ok, but if that's the objective why unleash the virus in your own country, and risk decimating your own economy?  Seems very far-fetched.  There's already a conspiracy theory in China that the virus was planted by America.

Edited March 13, 2020 by Alex_Krycek

[dimreepr]

9 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Cyberwarfare is infinitely more efficient, which is why it is their preferred course of action.  COVID-19 is pure chaos for all countries involved.

Ok, but if that's the objective why unleash the virus in your own country, and risk decimating your own economy?  Seems very far-fetched.  There's already a conspiracy theory in China that the virus was planted by America.

I was 'trying' to be satirical.😐 

[dimreepr]

19 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Chronic coughing  would seem the most concerning.

Indeed, just not in this context. 😊

19 hours ago, Curious layman said:

Fuck, that's fascinating and slightly terrifying at the same time.

Fuck, that's spookily accurate and not, at the same time. 🙂

[Sensei]

23 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Fuck, that's spookily accurate and not, at the same time. 🙂

Like the entire history. . It is written by survivors and winners i.e. heavily biased.. exaggerated victories, diminished loses, gaps filled by guesses or made up stuff etc.

Edited March 14, 2020 by Sensei

[dimreepr]

Just now, Sensei said:

Like the entire history. . It is written by the survivors and winners i.e. heavily biased..

Well, that's evolution for ya... 😉

14 minutes ago, Sensei said:

exaggerated victories, diminished loses, gaps filled by guesses or made up stuff etc.

Don't forget the context... are you contagious???