Lollipop World
by rsbakker
What are the odds that I would finish writing a near-future viral thriller (The Lollipop Factory) just as 2019-nCoV was becoming entrenched in Wuhan? So, as it turned out, the first facts I wanted to know when I caught wind of the outbreak were things like the resource requirements for treatment, the average transmission rate per person, and whether transmission was asymptomatic. The sudden rush to build new hospitals answered the first question: 2019-nCoV was a resource intensive disease. As it turns out, some 18% of those with verified cases require intensive care. This fact became mind-boggling as more and more estimates of the transmission rate bubbled to the surface of the web: on average, investigators think 2019-nCoV is around twice as contagious as the seasonal flu. And if this weren’t bad enough, we now have solid evidence of asymptomatic transmission: as relieved as I was to learn that infected children weren’t getting sick, I understood the kind of epidemiological nightmare this represented. How do you contain a disease you can’t see?
So what’s the upshot?
2019-nCoV is more difficult to contain than the seasonal flu, and so, likely beyond containment short severe and sustained (ie, economic activity killing) restrictions on face-to-face interaction. Either way, we are likely at the beginning of the wildfire season, not the middle, nor the end.
The lethality of 2019-nCoV will be a function of the resources available to treat critical cases. If this reaches influenza pandemic proportions, then 2019-nCoV will likely be more, not less, deadly than SARS (which killed, given the resources available at the time, around 10% of those infected).
Personally, given the way Chinese authorities bungled the outbreak at the start, and given the alarming tendency of the WHO and CDC to communicate only the most optimistic appraisals of 2019-nCoV, I think this will be the biggest thing to hit humanity since World War II.
For the critically minded, most of the estimates referenced above can be found agreggated here. There’s countless caveats, of course, including the mutability 2019-nCoV itself, which could, like SARS, become less lethal over time. But don’t be lulled by calm-at-all-costs bureaucrats or the nothing-to-see-here Wall Street Bulls: the stakes may not be apocalyptic, but they are civilizational.
POSTSCRIPT (2/11/2020)
The General Director of the WHO, in addition to revealing the official name of the disease, Covid-19, has finally called on nations to treat it as “public enemy number one.” Markets reach record highs. Babies are kissed in New Hampshire.
POSTSCRIPT (2/12/2020)
Much of the latest cutting-edge research can be found here, expertly summarized no less. Ontario learned some hard lessons during SARS. Let’s all hope the good guys can delay this until spring. Maybe Africa, India, and Indonesia have no cases because they’re simply too warm for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus’s official official name). Better to suffer the nightmare next winter, once we’ve prepared.
Three Pound Brain 
I was made to believe the number of actual infections is severly underreported – as some might be asymptomatic, or confused with regular flu. Any thoughts on that?
Certainly quite a few troubling rumours coming out of Wuhan: the CCN freelancers are having a heyday.
Yeah, lollipop factory! I lost hope when you drive crashed again, but then saw a glimmer once you found part of it. Glad to see you made it whole.
Now just to wait for it to be published. Are you still with Overlook?
Overlook was purchased by Abrams last year: but I’m not sure this would be their cup o’ tea. I’ve yet to write up a synopsis for my agent to pitch.
That’s a big call, Scott. What’s the time frame for the fruition of your hypothesis, as a method of disapproval?
Hopefully some bureaucrats and bulls get on the sharp end of it, so it doesn’t just seem like another disaster which in the aftermath is itself an economic opportunity.
The disapproval comes built in Callan!
If it really is as transmissible as it seems then it will likely become endemic, going underground and erupting, and so on, like the flu. If its as crafty at reorganizing its surface proteins as the flu, then we’ll find ourselves trusting to vaccines, and dreading the nCoV season.
I can’t really see a disproving method there, just a transmission vector?
But overall the adaptive pseudo intelligence of diseases is a big deal and the more humans there are the more they have a chance to get a foot in the door. It’s a shame our predators aren’t saber tooth tigers or other diablo-esque monsters that are satisfying to our instincts and instead just tiny shit that hacks your system, but while those with bunkers to run to want to treat it like we are all at the top of the foodchain and tell everyone to be calm, we’re still a food supply to some psuedo creatures and are being predated on. But then again another introduced apex predator has been feeding on human lives as well. But that’s all going according to plan, o/c, even though I imagine the world wide road death toll over the years rivals world war 2.
They were never going to lock it down enough to stamp it out utterly. Or do you think they could have? Is that what WHO and CDC think, that they can lock down and burn out to extinction any new viruses? Fanciful. Of course it’s going to go underground – no ones going to stop that. There’s no one to blame in that regard.
dr gabriel leung of hku gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago that projected the peak of contagion around late april: https://youtu.be/aYyH4N8VXvA?t=1753
All the models turn on parameters that turn on guesswork that is only slowly becoming more educated, and even still, the transmission rate is going to vary wildly depending on the conditions: few nations have the combination of technical capacity and political authority possessed by China.
been telling folks not to worry about speculative future engineering advances, the real threats are already in the mix…
Like Jorge says, maybe it is a future engineering advance!
It’s certainly demonstrating what happens when economies lose their modularity. Wall Street is in for an ugly surprise.
same difference with the housing bubble that nearly took down the whole house (pardon the pun) of cards, mutating viruses is old hat as is bugs hitching rides.
HYPE LEVEL = Busy.Beaver(Graham’s Number)
itshappening.gif
to be clear, the hype is for the novel, not for the CRISPERed up nightmare from Wuhan. (and yeah, I’m wearing the tinfoil hat on this one- BSL4 lab right next door to the bat market is just too damn coincidental for me)
It is pretty creepy. It really does seem to be a ginned up SARS.
The genomic analysis in the link I added above seems to confirm zoonotic origin. Still could have been an accident though: apparently some of the researchers working at the bsl-4 in Wuhan have published on bat coronaviruses.
So, this paper claims it’s almost certainly zoonotic, and I’m publicly acquiescing to that narrative:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Here’s the thing though… do a Straussian reading on that bad boy. Like, look at the evidence with the Eyes of a Snake and disregard what they wrote around their analysis. Specifically, look at that polybasic site. Where the hell did that come from?
I understand why they might want to silence that narrative though. Two nuclear powers poised in a Thucydides trap… maybe gotta smooth the rough edges here. And it really could be zoonotic, viruses pick all sorts of strange things by the ill-fated happenstance of nucleic acid recombination.
See, I was right. The narrative is starting to shift to lab leak. Let’s see, that puts me at about 1 year and 2 months ahead of the game.
And I wasn’t even using probability trance.
I am so hyped for Lollipop Factory! Cannot wait!
In conversation with David Roden
https://vimeo.com/318406565
Very awesome. David gives some lucid distillations of his most important views. He and I were actually shouted at and publicly condemned at a conference in Toronto last November. It was a blast!
heh, was that recorded?
Are you sure about that? Seems pretty contained to me, although I don’t follow it closely. 1000 deaths so far? Doesn’t seem like much worse than the regular flu.
Anyway I’m not worried myself, my immune system will probably fuck this virus up. Would be happy to read some scientific articles about it though, i.e. stuff about its genome and proteins.
Trump and the markets agree! Just follow the link to Worldometer in the post and you’ll find all the latest research.
But just think about it: Who locks down the world’s second largest economy to stop the flu?
Yours was the first response that had me truly alarmed. Since this post, I have watched the rest of the world seem to wake up to the reality that is Covid-19, and the danger it poses to us all.
Sadly, madly, my all too analytical brain looks past this and wonders- is this the straw that breaks the camel’s back and gets Americans universal healthcare for those who are left alive?
The potential effects of the virus on the geopolitical landscape stretch out before us like the trackless plain… I guess it’s too early to tell where this all might end, but I agree with your assessment that it will be civilization-shaking, at the least.
Thanks for continuing to write.
So it’s been a long hard lockdown, but I re read some of your books and that helped.
Apsolutely love them, and love the world. Would love to know more about the DnD campaign that inspired them some day!
Since I always miss your AMAs, here are three simple questions that have particularly bothered me, but none of them are ‘big’ questions (I think) that ask to explain some of the big plot, but quite understand if you don’t want to answer!
1) What is the Nail of Heaven!? It was there before Arkfall but then flared, and just happened to be the brightest star in the sky and the North Star…seems like too much of a conincidence!
2) Is there a reason you made Sorcerers turn to Salt in particular when touche by Chorae, or was it just a cool idea (I think it’s cool) which is fine btw!
3) Could Emilidis still be alive….?
ty dude. Stay safe.
Came here looking for any TSA updates, and found this post – fascinating reading it almost a year after it was posted.
Are there any more updates on Lollipop Factory? I guess the pandemic has put these kind of works in a strange limbo.
Any news on TSA would also be fantastic 🙂
Bakker, please. We miss you.
Have a Merry Circumfixmas.
“But don’t be lulled by calm-at-all-costs bureaucrats or the nothing-to-see-here Wall Street Bulls: the stakes may not be apocalyptic, but they are civilizational.”
Well, that was a good call.