Peter Attia· MD
I have read that as the official range it's so broad is to be unhelpful that's really the camel are not that's the spread from camel to human and then as you said human to human transmission is probably going to occur in the hospital and so MERS becomes the scariest of them all just unmoor tality because the official numbers are basically it killed a third of the people that were infected it's about almost 900 deaths out of call it 2500 confirmed cases that's about as scary as any virus may be outside of Ebola but again the absolute numbers are so low the transmissibility human-to-human doesn't seem as high especially when you consider that the scariest viruses are ones that are transmitted from asymptomatic people right yeah so this one like SARS is mostly transmitted from people who have lung disease already have severe lung disease I don't think they are known is actually camel to camel I don't think it takes that at the consideration rather but what it takes to the consideration is the hospital spread there's like SARS and somewhat hospitals but that's been basically not stopped completely because it's my friends in Saudi Arabia say somebody comes in with this disease we think about it quickly but we may not think about it in every case quickly enough so there may be still some spread within the hospital so knows a comeall spread which you're referring to in hospital spread is a big problem because you just don't have it on the front of your mind that every person who shows up in respiratory distress could have this and therefore a potentially the health care workers themselves can be infected because it's not just the proximity but it's the type of procedures that are being done when you put a breathing tube in somebody you're really creating an effective portal for the virus to get to you and then obviously we know how infections like that can spread through intensive care units and such yeah that's exactly right that's exactly why it's a problem so why did this not turn into even an epidemic within the Arabian Peninsula I mean you did mention that we still see a few cases each year but 2500 confirmed cases directionally makes it not even a sort of an epidemic really let alone a pandemic why do you think this just wasn't something that spread despite its potential for devastation at the mortality level because I think that that are not 0.3 really makes it not possible or not likely there's plenty of cases with murders where people went back to relatively poor country after having been a worker in Saudi Arabia were found to be infected and infected nobody so that nobody became ill from that patient even though they weren't really looked at that's as opposed to Korea where there's that one patient who are infected 186 people so there was a really a confluence of lots of bad luck about to have occurred and then going back to Tsarskoe v1 what basically accounts for the eradication of that call it in 2003-2004 the combination of there being no reservoir so it's not like camels which could continue introduce him to human populations and the fact that because you weren't contagious till you were sick it was easy to look at somebody's how that person has SARS we're gonna stick them in a room by himself take care of him and make sure he infects nobody else then you would stop the disease it's a classic kind of quarantine an identification qualitative we talk about all the time with the cult of 19 but it's really feasible with SARS when you talk to me about a total of 8,000 cases around the world I mean Stan Lee to hear you tell the story this way it's just it's like a bad movie because you could be lulled into a false sense of confidence by the time MERS blows over you can say hey okay I got it we've got a few of these coronaviruses they cause a bunch of colds you get a runny nose in the summer but it's really nothing and yeah it's true two really bad actors showed up that on a virus to virus level can really hurt their hosts but they're nothing to really be afraid of in the case of SARS one it has two things that make it really friendly to humans one it can't bounce back and forth between humans and animals and - you don't really spread you're very unlikely to spread it if you're not symptomatic you don't have to shut the world down but not only that you get to isolate people when they're sick and treat them before they treat others so the virus really gave up two big potential superpowers in the case of MERS sure it lives in animals and it's never gonna leave those animals but it has such a poor ability to spread between humans almost under any circumstance unless you're probably sticking a breathing tube in them that it was just so easy to contain if the story stop there you'd say cabrona viruses are just not a threat to us yeah so I think some people in the field more than me said let's go look at a corona viruses in fact and so what they did is they found other corona viruses and it was actually for a scientific reason or different one than just searching for the viruses we were trying to figure out where did the SARS coronavirus really begin so people when looked at bat colonies are throughout China since that's where SARS began and asked