justanyone's Journal: Effects of Pandemic

I read an article on the possiblity of a SARS pandemic (epidemic of very large proportion). It was short and only kind of interesting; I wanted it to be longer and cover subjects like I've been considering...

1. What are the primary and secondary mechanisms for transmission of SARS? Examples:
Touch skin-skin
objects-water-wet
objects-dry
body-fluid-2-body-fluid
body-fluid 2-skin
breath-breath
breath-skin
breath-dry-object
breath-water-wet-object
spore-inhale
spore-touch
primary-delivery-mechanism-only

2. Have there been any SARS infections of pregnant or nursing moms, and if so, what were the effects on the children?

3. It seems to me the more interesting question is what the large scale effects of SARS epidemic (or any epidemic) would be on U.S. society? How would people act differently?

4. What goods or services would be in short supply after the beginning of the epidemic? Food? Water? Gasoline (no mass transit usage due to contagion fears)? Electricity (transport of coal, etc.)? Lysol? Ammonia? Ammunition? (etc.)

5. It seems many people would begin to telecommute, and this would become much more popular and accepted. This would dictate towards falling housing prices in dense urban settings due to people fleeing contagion, shortages, and lack of need for them to be 'close' to work.

6. If the primary onset is in winter, do the above factors change vs. it being in summer?

7. If there is no treatment, and people mob the hospitals anyway, that causes lots of other deaths from normally treatable causes.

8. If the transmission rate changes over the course of the disease, have any models been created to understand how that effects treatment methodologies?

if the seriousness of the disease changes (from 10% mortality to 20% mortality) during the
run of the disease, does this reduce the transmission rate?

I suppose there are several time periods to consider

1. EXP-INF: the delay between exposure and when the subject first becomes infectious,
2. INF-AWR: the delay between infectiousness and awareness of being sick;
3. AWR-TRT: the delay between awareness and treatment,
4. TRT-END: the delay between treatment and recovery or death.

I'm thinking the most dangerous diseases are the ones that have a long INF-AWR timeframe.

if the EXP-INF time is short but the INF-AWR time is long, they still have time to infect a lot of others.

if the INF-AWR time is long, they infect before they know they're sick.

The disease has to work against the epidemiology of being able to just stay home for a couple of days. If a disease spreads instantly from person to person, and they become aware instantly, they can stop themselves. Further, someone tracking their movements backward can find everyone affected. Longer times make that impossible, methinks.

I can reliably remember where I was, pretty much every minute, for about 1 week back. Farther than that, I'm fuzzy but it's still possible. More than that, the trail is cold.

On the other hand, if the disease takes that long to spread, people can seek treatment before they die. So, any disease with a INF-AWR delay of about 1 week to 2 weeks will probably be the most widespread and therefore deadly.

Of all these questions, the most interesting ones to me are the effect of an epidemic on the social norms in the years following it.

Will shaking hands be less common?

Eating at restaurants would seem bad; lots of people would have touched your food before you, and that's not safe. So, people will be eating lots of packaged foods that are packed by machines and not ever touched by human hands. So, McDonald's stock will plummet.

The following are companies that would fare either very badly or very well in an epidemic situation:
- BAD: McDonalds, Pepsico (owners of Pizza Hut, KFC, etc.), and restaurant supply houses;
- GOOD: (Possibly) Peapod grocery delivery (eliminates going outside entirely, using gas, etc., but must be sanitary.
- GOOD: Del Monte - canned veggies and fruits can be disinfected before opening, these seem more safe.
- GOOD: Hospital supply and drug companies (obviously);
- BAD: Hospitals, HMO's, state governments: lots of indigent patients.
- BAD: Oil companies, unable to get their product to market due to shipping troubles, probably also loosing lots of money on existing contracts presuming a maximum price they'll get for various products;
- BAD: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, OPEC, etc. - cannot get their product to market, but prices will be much higher.
- GOOD: telecoms. TV will be big business, people staying at home will want to do something with their time. Likewise phone companies, and internet companies, ISP's, since people will subsitute virtual meetings for real ones.
- BAD: The travel industry. No one wants to spend time on airplanes, trains, busses, etc. when the people around them could kill them by breathing on 'em.
- BAD: commodities and stock exchanges where the process is open-outcry instead of computer-traded. Highly paid traders won't set foot on an open floor where there's a huge crowd waiting to breathe on them, even if the disease vector is only touch.