eli5 how SARS was contained successfully on such a large scale as to prevent international infection?
In: Biology
SARS was not contagious until after symptoms became apparent allowing infected people to be quarantined and traced more easily. COVID is contagious before showing symptoms and has asymptomatic carriers. I don’t even know if these words are spelled correctly but that’s the basic answer.
COVID-19 is apparently much more infectious. Also, unlike SARS, infected people can transmit it before showing any symptoms.
I just thought I would add that there is often confusion between the virus and the disease caused by the virus. SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are the viruses that cause the diseases SARS and COVID-19 respectively. Something to note is that they also have comparable reproductive numbers, which tells you how many new infections a single person directly causes.
The main reason the SARS pandemic was effectively controlled was due to infected individuals only being contagious after displaying symptoms, allowing for infected individuals to be isolated before they could spread the virus.
Another reason is the increased global interconnectivity compared to 20 years ago, allowing for the much faster spread globally.
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