Quotes About Pandemic

Leave it to an Obama supporter to bring up Iraq in the middle of a conversation about the swine flu pandemic.

With COVID-19, I didn't have many symptoms luckily, so I think it's OK.

This pandemic has provided an opportunity to reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems, that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.

Unless the health authorities say schools have to shut down, I don't see why we should keep her home. She's not sick.

Here are the names of some emerging viruses: Lassa. Rift Valley. Oropouche. Rocio. Q. Guanarito. VEE. Monkeypox. Dengue. Chikungunya. The hantaviruses. Machupo. Junin. The rabieslike strains Mokola and Duvenhage. LeDantec. The Kyasanur Forest brain virus.

A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth. All of the earth's cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day—Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly.

The Semliki Forest agent. Crimean-Congo. Sindbis. O'nyongnyong. Nameless São Paulo. Marburg. Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire. Ebola Reston.

the family of filoviruses comprised Marburg along with two types of a virus called Ebola. The Ebolas were named Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Marburg was the mildest of the three filovirus sisters. The worst of them was Ebola Zaire. The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down with Ebola Zaire die of it. Ebola Zaire is a slate wiper in humans.

According to standard doctrine, there are basically three ways to stop a virus—vaccines, drugs, and biocontainment. There was no vaccine for Ebola. There was no drug treatment for Ebola. That left only biocontainment.

Are you worried about a species-threatening event?" He stared at me. "What the hell do you mean by that?" "I mean a virus that wipes us out." "Well, I think it could happen. Certainly it hasn't happened yet. I'm not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by some percentage. By thirty percent. By ninety percent.

Variola is now exotic to the human species, highly infective in humans, lethal, and difficult or impossible to cure. It is generally believed to be the most dangerous virus to the human species.

staff. A characteristic of a lethal, contagious, and incurable virus is that it quickly gets into the medical people.

PLAGUEY, PLAGUEY, PLAGUEY!

Give us this day our daily mask.

Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?

When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.

In some zoonotic pathogens, efficient transmissibility among humans seems to be inherent from the start, a sort of accidental preadaptedness for spreading through the human population, despite a long history of residence within some other host. SARS-CoV had it, from the earliest days of its 2002–2003 emergence in Guangdong and Hong Kong. SARS-CoV has it, no matter where or why SARS-CoV may be hiding since then.

R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald.

Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years.

I think the virus is present all the time, within reservoir species," he told me. "And sometimes there is transmission from reservoir species to other species.

There's no reason to assume that AIDS will stand unique, in our time, as the only such global disaster caused by a strange microbe emerging from some other animal. Some knowledgeable and gloomy prognosticators even speak of the Next Big One as an inevitability. (If you're a seismologist in California, the Next Big One is an earthquake that drops San Francisco into the sea, but in this realm of discourse it's a vastly lethal pandemic.)

In other words, HIV hasn't happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history.

The much darker story remains to be told, probably not about this virus but about another. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.

Now here's the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.