[conspire] "immunity" (COVID-19, ...) Re: Numbers racket

[paulz at ieee.org]

 zoonotic.  I had to look up the word:
from https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html


Zoonotic diseases are very common, both in the United States and around the world. Scientists estimate that more than 6 out of every 10 known infectious diseases in people can be spread from animals, and 3 out of every 4 new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals


So there isn't much of a "barrier" between animals and humans.


    On Sunday, May 3, 2020, 2:24:51 PM PDT, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:  
 

 Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Maybe my previous understanding was backwards.  Maybe the question is
> "why do we tend to think that most illnesses are specific to one
> species?"

I note with concurrence Deirdre's answer.  In addition, I was just going
to say that zoonotic diseases are probably de-facto rare enough that we
need an exotic word ('zoonotic') for the concept.  Our first-level
response, when we hear about things like Mad Cow Disease, that you're OK
if you're not a cow, is generally correct (albeit not if ingesting meat 
from Mad Cow Disease-infected cattle, oddly enough).

Of course, our intuition on that is partly based on relatively limited
contact between humans and other animals, and some apparently-new
zoonotic infections have been occurring as humans barge into formerly
remote animal habitats.  So, then you get odd cases of a veterinary
ailment that crosses into a single human host, and we think, wow, at
least we're lucky enough that the pathogen has no human-to-human
infection path.  Except, once in a blue moon, _that_ firewalling fails,
and then we're in November 2019 in Wuhan, and, oops!



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