Is The Coronavirus A Bioweapon?
I seriously doubt it. *If* so, it would be one of the least effective bioweapons ever developed.
So far, less than 2% of verified cases result in death. Reported deaths involve mostly already unhealthy and old people, not what would be the preferred target of healthy military aged. Many (if not most) people have relatively mild symptoms. The high number of mild symptoms may significantly reduce the fatality rate calculation, as there may be many with mild or no symptoms of persons that are never even tested to confirm infection.
This Wuhan coronavirus is very similar to the SARS coronavirus which was much more lethal. Makes NO sense to bioengineer a less effective virus as a weapon.
Link to a good Science News article via outline.com:
That is another good point against the man made conspirac- I mean arguments. While it is more contagious than SARS, it is not particularly lethal.
I don’t think it is a bioweapon either but if you were going to create a bioweapon you don’t need it to be lethal, if it’s lethal you would not get as much bang for the buck since the dead are not that big a burden. What you would aim for is a weapon that makes people very ill, too ill to work or to fight- but does not take away the hope of recovery. You just need it to incapacitate the victims to burden those who are healthy with tending to vast numbers of sick patients, and you need it to be known to be nonlethal so that stressed caregivers do not give up and drop the burden of tending to the ill, yet bad enough that victimes must be tended. That way you force the enemy to commit much of his resources, transport, food, etc., to the task- resources he cannot use against you.
I read (doesn't make it true) that the virus seems to affect Asian males more strongly than Asian females or those of other races, because of the relative distribution of a certain type of cell in the lung. If so, one could conceive of it as a differential vaccine gone bad, rather than an active attack weapon.
To me, that's still a second or third order conspiracy theory at present. I wonder if we'll ever get the whole story.
It could be an intermediate version - designed to test contagion and immune response before a final, more lethal variant was produced. It escaped the Wuhan lab due to incompetence or malice.
One effective battle strategy is to create a large number of injured to consume an opponents resources.
“I seriously doubt it. *If* so, it would be one of the least effective bioweapons ever developed.
So far, less than 2% of verified cases result in death....”
Now, whether your equation is valid or not, that does not answer the question of whether or not this is a bioweapon. I would tend to think not, just because it is difficult to make one that could not be easily detected, but then again the Chinese are not making it easy to believe that - because they initially quarantined about 50 million people with their army, and now the figure is reputed to be on the north side of 400 million. You don’t do that for a normal flu virus, let alone a cold.
Oh, BTW, even IF the death rate was about 2%, that would be 20 times the mortality rate for the “normal” flu, and it is at least as communicable as the normal flu (and maybe more so). 20 times the roughly 25,000 dead in this US alone is half a million people - nothing to sneeze at (no pun intended).
It does not pay to underestimate this disease, nor to go running around with one’s hair on fire. The actual truth is probably somewhere in between, and that is bad enough.