[ScubaDiver]

The primary reason the globe avoided catastrophe when SARS and MERS broke out is that both diseases aren’t very contagious until the patient is very sick and shedding lots of virus. Ebola is like this. It’s SUPER lethal but more difficult to catch because people have to be pretty sick to spread the disease. If SARS or MERS were as infectious as COVID is in its early stages, we really would have been screwed because Paul is correct, it’s significantly more lethal than COVID.

You take the genetic properties that makes COVID more infectious and insert those properties into either MERS or SARS, and then you really do have a pandemic easily on the scale of 1918.

[Myrddin]

SARS and MERS had poor binding affinity for ACE2 receptors in humans. It was primarily lung tissue ACE2. SARS-CoV-2 was engineered with an "improved" spike protein with better binding affinity to ACE2 in all human tissues. In addition, the protein sequence generated by the viral RNA was updated with a cleavage site (a location on a protein where a protease cuts a protein) that utilize of "furin-like" geometry to take advantage the more ubiquitous availability of that protease in human cells.

[TBP]

You take the genetic properties that makes COVID more infectious and insert those properties into either MERS or SARS, and then you really do have a pandemic easily on the scale of 1918.

And think of how much power that entails!

And again, POWER IS THE ONLY thing they care about.

[TBP]

You take the genetic properties that makes COVID more infectious and insert those properties into either MERS or SARS, and then you really do have a pandemic easily on the scale of 1918.

And think of how much power that entails!

And again, POWER IS THE ONLY THING THEY CARE ABOUT.