On 3 Apr 2020 at 6:23, Jeff Zeitlin wrote:

> 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?

then you're in real trouble. Unless X-boats get the word ahead of
ships carrying infected people, it'll just keep spreading.

> Consider the question of a novel disease: How long does it to develop
> a vaccine, antitoxin, antibiotic, or metabolic that's effective
> against it?

Well, currently, a vaccine can be developed in *days* (possibly even
hours) once they have the gene sequence of the virus.

Might be possible to develop bactiophages in that sort of tiome some
day.

anti-biotics take *years* to find.

> Once developed and certified safe (and how long does that
> certification take?), how long does it take to deploy, and how
> complete is application

Alas, that's where trouble comes in. We've got *several* candidate
vaccines for Covid-19. But even doing terribly risky things like
going direct to human testing, it'll be months if not *years* before
they are tested enough to release. They're talking 2022...

> 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! :)

This is likely to be another one of those "raising TLs won't help a
lot" situations. You can speed up *some* things. but testing is
always going to be a problem because it depends on doing things with
humans and you can't speed that part up.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com