They'd be socially isolated from *interstellar* or maybe even *interplanetary* travellers. Maybe not from one another.

I have two more neat ideas:

So, you want to be a spacer, son? Step 1: Pass the physical. Demonstrate you learned the lessons and the first decompression won't kill you.

Step 2: Get ready for a 3 month quarantine. It seems long, but that's so that the medical staff at the starport can give you vaccinations or direct antibody loads customized to you and to every common threat within 30 parsecs. If you pass that distance, you need to re-up. You probably get a booster every year after that with a few more.

It's one of the few reasons that we spacers can just walk onto most nearby planets. We've already had vaccines for the common threats and out immune boosters we take in pill form every month help keep us up. We can get pills made per planetfall or subsector we plan to fly to.

But that first set of antibody booster or vaccines... lots at once. It's a miserable first three months. Good training for some miserable situations you can get in the great big, galaxy.

Next notion:

Every time you hit port and get medical inward clearance, that really means they tag you with a bunch of boosters (or a pill or something) for the current things on the planet (assuming any sort of decent port - C or better with a medic). If you are off on D's or E's or X's... well, better bring your own medic with a wide range of treatments and boosters!

Next notion (3 of 2!):

All life support systems in good liners or well appointed ships will watch for new micro-organisms and bring them to the attention of the ship's medic (or if an onboard automed is available, maybe that). They can initiate quarantine and start giving the crew boosters. This would cover the 'passenger slipped through screening' or 'we went to a backwater and all I got was this lousy exovirus!' cases.

I think something like that could be almost seamless in play except if the GM wanted to make a fuss of it on occasion as annoyance or genuine threat.

On pirate ships, someone who infects his buddies might just go out the airlock...

As to novel corona virus, all of them were novel to us in the early days. We built up some herd resistance (note: you take a lot of dead people if the virus kills you faster than your immune system can fire up and the more novel, the longer that takes.... also long asymptomatic contagious period is a b****). We also developed vaccines. Those both take time.

That said, not all coronas are equally serious in the symptoms they cause. There are outliers and 1918, 2020, and whenver SARS and MERS happened were likely outliers on the dangerous side (right mix of dangerous, fast moving or stealth, or both). There's always a continuum in the natural world and these are worse versions. It may be we *can't* develop a vaccine (HIV comes to mind as a viral example). It may be natural resistance when it is acquired lasts weeks, or months, not 2 years (as in the case of the survivors of SARS). These factors also affect net lethality. But I think the long asymptomatic period is the greatest part - people give it to a bunch of people because they don't know they are sick. Regular coronas (influenza flavours) have a shorter asymptomatic period and are not anywhere near as transmissive in that asymptomatic stage. They can surely be spread, but not with the facility or the length of asymptomatic stage as Sars-Cov-2 (the virus, vs. Covid-19 which is the disease caused in the body by Sars-Cov-2).

I hope if someone is going to shut down social distancing and fire up the economy, my country isn't the first. I think that will lead to another big outbreak and many more deaths. It's not something I want anyone to face, but there's a lot of pressure for that.

TomB

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 4:08 AM Kenneth Barns <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 12:44, <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
There's also the unknown of 'how does a foreign pathogen affect a human'? Will alien virus affect us? I'm guessing not often. Bacteria maybe, but viruses for different body chemistries maybe not so much. So most of what we'd be exposed to would be things we took with us or successive evolutions of same. (Bioweapons not accounted for)

I can see high-tech medical being available at good starports to quickly scan for common threats and the higher the tech, the more it might recognize variations on a known threat. That might help catch a lot of it. At lower tech places, you have the Spanish wiping out Mezoamericans.... to some degree.

It's an interesting thought experiment.  COVID is not necessarily any more harmful than any other coronavirus, most of which cause only minor symptoms.  What makes it such a threat is its novelty, and the consequent inability of our immune system to hit it hard, early.  (In fact, one of the suspicions about why it is so lethal is that the immune response is what is killing most people, and the immune response is only fully kicking in once the virus has multiplied for a week or so ... versus kicking in the first few hours as with a non-novel coronavirus.)

So, given MagicTech, would we assume that the screening at the starport is trying to identify any variation of a pathogen that is not recognised in the world's medical databases?  I think the difficulty with that is that pretty much _every_ inbound traveller is going to have a "novel pathogen" of one kind or another, and most of those will be essentially harmless.  (Or, rather, the costs of attempting to routinely exclude those pathogens will be greater than the costs of putting up with a pandemic every decade or so.  Imagine New Zealand trying to use border protection to prevent seasonal influenza from being imported each year!)

Given the efficacy of the various responses to COVID, I think a HiTec society would implement widespread social isolation with minimal disruption as a first-line response to any AI-identified statistical abnormality in the types of disease presenting for medical attention.  Potentially reusable head-and-neck masks to filter out respiratory pathogens, or full-body suits, might be standard family equipment above a certain TL.  Ubiquitous use of personal computing devices would make contact tracing much easier.  (One of the advantages of social isolation is that, if you DO acquire COVID, it is now much easier to identify who you might have acquired it from and who you might have given it to, as compared to when you were in contact with hundreds of people on a daily basis.)

Thus, the Traveller milieu is one where it is near impossible (given communication difficulties, and frequent contact between generally-isolated worlds) to prevent the inter-world spread of a pandemic, but relatively easy for HiTec worlds (compared to TL-2020) to shut down a pandemic when it arrives.  In fact, given the likely frequency of importing novel pathogens, I think you could make a case that _every_ HiTec world would be living under somewhat socially isolated conditions (by our standards) _all_ the time ... because the worlds that don't will be racked by pandemics on a regular basis.

Cheers,
KenB

-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=RDHE7iRpfwqlHvVvWBIhpJZsbTiD5NnL