Can Somebody Please Reinstall 2020? It Seems To Have a Virus!

Abstract

In December 2019, news of another virus, a SARS variant was streaming out of China. The previous SARS-CoV-1 2002-2004 had infected less than 9,000 individuals with an 11% mortality, the virus stopped as quickly as it had started. Epidemiologists were reporting a highly contagious novel SARS-CoV-2 variant with high R0 ‘R naught’ that represents how quickly a disease is spreading, or how many people one sick individual would infect. COVID019 had an initial R0 of 2 to 3; with the Omicron variant R0 nearly 7. This meant that each person infected with the original strain of COVID-19 would infect 2 to 3 more people. Patients would present with symptoms ranging from fever, chills, cough, and fatigue on the low end of the spectrum, all the way to difficulty breathing with profound hypoxia and overwhelming multi-organ failure with a mortality rate upwards of 4%.