LogFAQs > #976090929

Pogo_Marimo posted...

But that's just a correlation. It's not even a rule of thumb. You can just look to the Bubonic plague for a disease with a comparable fatality rate and see that transmissibility is actually dependent on a great deal many more factors than "mortality rate", and simplifying the issue down to mortality rate fundamentally misrepresents how infectious diseases work.

I think you're missing the big point here. Bubonic Plague had a completely different mechanism of transmission that person to person. It didn't matter there that an infected person might just die because it wasn't counting on that person to spread. If the report about it being spread person-to-person is accurate (note: I am just taking post 24 at face value), comparing it to Bubonic Plague is apples and oranges.

There are indeed a ton of variables that affect transmissibility, but there's also a world of difference between a zoonotic disease and an anthroponotic disease. And with anthroponotic diseases, mortality rates are a bigger factor.

a disease with human-to-human transmission needs the virus to be able to keep you up and infecting those around you - if its severe enough to leave you bedridden and you die, you don't have much of a chance to spread - making it likely for the virus to just run through all the infected population, and then the only people left either have a built-up immune response or are dead.

I agree it isn't a definite answer, but its definitely a factor here.