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A comment on Ask HN: How are you preparing for COVID-19 disruptions?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How are you preparing for COVID-19 disruptions? by jacquesm on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @06:40PM (#22428746)
The higher mortality rate of SARS and MERS - counterintuitively - helped to contain it, as well as the fact that it was only spread by people showing symptoms.
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Re:Ask HN: How are you preparing for COVID-19 disruptions? by dfsegoat on Friday February 28, 2020 @10:02AM (#22443194)
Not implying anything: But this tracks with my understanding of how USSR and USA wanted to select bacterial/virologic bioweapons [1]:

An agent that killed very quickly e.g. Ebola is actually not a very good bioweapon. You want something with a long incubation period that is infectious before people are symptomatic.

Things that incubate in short order + kill hosts quickly "burn the epidemic out" before it can spread.

Ideally it also can survive outside of a host for some period of time as well.

1 - Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston

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