• Question: How could the coronavirus affect human life if it got more deadly?

    Asked by anon-251263 on 21 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Ella Mercer

      Ella Mercer answered on 21 Apr 2020:

      That’s a really good question and something that might be quite worrying to people at the moment! Scientists are still working to really understand this type of coronavirus because it’s so new so it’s difficult to say what might happen if it developed into something more harmful.

      However, a really good example of a more deadly disease is the bubonic plague that swept across the world in the 14th century. It was very different to coronavirus but similar in that it could be spread by water droplets in coughs and sneezes. The bubonic plague killed around 50,000,000 people across the world (so far there have been just over 170,000 coronavirus deaths). It affected human life in different ways;

      1) Like with coronavirus, people self-isolated. They were very scared of catching the disease because it was so deadly so didn’t even go out once a day to exercise!

      2) Working conditions actually improved! Because lots of people had died there was a huge demand for jobs to be filled- those who survived could be more selective who they worked for and they demanded (and got!) higher wages and better working conditions because employers were so desperate for workers.

      I hope some of the other scientists might be able to add some more to my answer 🙂

    • Photo: Ozge Ozkaya

      Ozge Ozkaya answered on 21 Apr 2020:

      The thing about the coronavirus is that it just has the “right deadliness”. I had a professor at university who used to say: “A good virus doesn’t kill its host”. As you know viruses are not really alive, i.e. they cannot reproduce by themselves so they need to use the host’s cellular machinery to copy their genetic material and make more viruses. If the virus is too deadly, it can’t be very successful in spreading since when its host dies it “dies” too. So if the coronavirus was more deadly it might not affect this many people, or last this long. The other thing to think about is the time it takes for the host (infected person) to die. Because it takes around 14 days for the symptoms of the coronavirus to appear, an infected person spreads the virus to a lot of people before they become sick, so from the point of view of the virus, it’s not really important anymore whether or not the host dies. So to add to my professor’s statement, “a good virus doesn’t kill it’s host IMMEDIATELY” 😉

    • Photo: Freya Harrison

      Freya Harrison answered on 21 Apr 2020:

      This is an excellent question. There are lots of things to think about in answering it, and Ella and Ozge have given brilliant answers already. I’m going to add one more thing: if the corona virus got just a little bit more dangerous to people, it might actually be easier to track and contain it. One big problem is that most people who catch it seem to not show any symptoms at all. This means that lots of people who don’t know they have the virus go about their normal lives and spread it to other people – some of whom get very ill. If the coronavirus made almost everyone people who got it show some symptoms very soon after they got infected, then we would all have a better idea of whether we had it or not. That would mean that we could isolate ourselves and prevent it spreading to other people better.

    • Photo: Wei Xun

      Wei Xun answered on 21 Apr 2020:

      Really great answers from fellow scientists.

      Just to add, the current coronavirus (or SARS-CoV-2 as its official name) is so dangerous because it is new. We as populations have no immunity against it so many people get very ill.

      Although viruses tend to get less deadly as they evolve over longer periods. Exactly as Ozge said, a really successive virus is one that doesn’t kill its host so that it can be spread to others. An example of a REALLY successive virus is the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), it is incredibly widely spread – found in ~95% in healthy adults across the world. And once infected, most people have mild or no symptoms at all, but it does hide within you for life. Problems happen when an individual’s immune systems becomes compromised, and the virus has been linked to cancers.

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