We recently discovered that disgusting humans and crowded trains aren’t a good combination because it results in a quick and easy way to spread bacteria all around a city.
While scientists say that the bacteria is all harmless, this does leave open one big question: what would happen if a deadly virus with no vaccine were to spread rapidly?
The answer can be boiled down to two words – catastrophically bad.
The John Hopkins Center for Health Security recently ran a realistic simulation that replicated how governments, agencies, and organisations respond to a rapidly spreading health pandemic.
To ensure they covered all potential health-related apocalyptic scenarios short of zombies rising up, the simulation also replicated what would happen should genetically engineered viruses be used as deadly weapons.
The numbers weren’t particularly promising. After one year, no vaccine had been found and the worldwide death toll hit 150 million. At 20 months – when the simulation was stopped – the death toll was expected hit 900 million.
Holy hell, that means humanity would be extinct in just 15 years according to some quick napkin math. Those aliens had better hurry up if they want to wipe us out because there will be no one left by the time they get here.
Even more terrifyingly, the simulation aimed to be as real as possible rather than highlighting a worst case scenario and the results are not promising.
Using a simulated virus based on the very real and very deadly Nipah virus, the outbreak results worldwide panic, death cults aiming to weaponise the virus rise up, and the current measures and infrastructure aimed at fighting the pandemic fails spectacularly.
All this actually sounds like the average post-apocalyptic movie, which means that filmmakers been more accurate than we originally gave them credit for and were in fact making pseudo-documentaries disguised as fiction.
The simulation ultimately revealed two things that make humanity an easy target for a full-blown virus outbreak.
We simply don’t have the ability to make a vaccine within the months it takes for a pandemic to spread worldwide (it realistically takes decades), and containment is not possible as the world’s current health systems will be overrun by the surge of sufferers affected by the pandemic.
The scientists ultimately came to one conclusion should a deadly virus strike us tomorrow: we’re screwed.
If there is a silver lining to this, all those paranoid people who were ridiculed for building a bunker in the event of the apocalypse can now laugh back at their critics for ever doubting them.