On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 14:22:25 -0700 (PDT), Thomas RUX <xxxxxx@comcast.net>
wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>I think there was a question about plagues GDW JTAS 13 has a topic of Plague: Disease and Treatment in Traveller pp. 33-36

A good Classic Traveller treatment of the topic on a character level; if
they haven't already been, they should probably be tweaked and brought
forward into current rulesets. Someone, please do so and submit the result
to Freelance Traveller - preferably Real Soon Now; I can _always_ use
articles, and I can usually use them _yesterday_.

My original question, however, was more on the macro level: how do _worlds_
or _interstellar polities_ handle the spread of disease? What happens when
a particular virus or virus family goes pandemic or endemic on a particular
world? Especially, what happens if the asymptomatic-but-infectious period
is a week or longer?

Consider the question of a novel disease: How long does it to develop a
vaccine, antitoxin, antibiotic, or metabolic that's effective against it?
Once developed and certified safe (and how long does that certification
take?), how long does it take to deploy, and how complete is application
(and where, if at all, is the reservoir of the disease agent)? How
"mutaphilic" is the disease agent? (Mutaphilic/mutaphobic: neologism for
the quality of mutating into a different form easily - the virus family
that causes influenza is highly mutaphilic; those for diseases such as
measles, chicken pox/shingles, mumps, or polio are mutaphobic/not
mutaphilic.)

Essentially, all the questions that are being asked about COVID-19 right
now in the real world are what I'm suggesting we think about in a Traveller
context, and come up with Traveller answers for (since we can't come up
with real-world solutions...). And yes, I want articles on these! :)

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