If you search "warcraft pandemic", you'll find videos and articles about the virtual pandemic of "corrupted blood" in the World of Warcraft online video game (MMORPG). (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=warcraft+pandemic&atb=v206-1&ia=web) A virus that spread throughout this unreal world, killing many characters over and over again. You'll discover this happened in 2005, and that scientists researched this virtual pandemic to learn from it. You'll also discover that, although it happened in a video game, players behaved much as humans in the current pandemic behave, exhibiting the full range of reactions (trying to get your stuff back, deliberately infecting others, paranoia, stress, helping others to stay alive, logging off until the disease was gone, fleeing to remote parts of the game, keeping in touch with other players to see how they are, and more). I guess the question to ask is: why didn't the research into this virtual virus help us with SARS-CoV-2?
How did it spread? Well, a new "boss" match had been added and the players found a way to defeat it - corrupting their blood, which the boss monster was using to heal itself. This ended up resulting in that monster's defeat, but they were all infected, including their pets (animals that fight or help). However, the group found a way to heal the corrupted blood infection, and healed all players and pets...Except one lone pet wolf. For some reason, that wolf couldn't be cured, so it was "dismissed" back to the stable, which the player hoped would cause it to be cured. It turned out to be a naive hope because when that player returned to the city and got the wolf from the stable, everyone nearby was immediately infected. It spread quickly from there, doing 250 damage per second, which killed all lower-level players pretty much immediately, and efforts to stem the tide were, at best, a losing strategy - even with the help of top "healers" in the game. Worse yet, the plague could infect not only players and their pets, but also infect non-player characters (NPCs). Although the plague would fairly quickly burn off if you were alone, it would bounce between you, pets and other NPCs as long as you were close together, causing even mid-level characters to die if the players were inattentive. The only thing was, while players and pets had visual and auditory cues (the sight and sound of splattering blood every 2.5 seconds), NPCs were symptomless and unaffected by the damage - thus becoming asymptomatic carriers of the plague. Ultimately, the entirety of the game's servers had to be reset to stop the virtual pandemic. If only the real world were that simple!
Some researchers and also players were Dr. Nina Fefferman, epidemiologist, and Dimitri Williams, Associate Professor, USC.
Why weren't we more prepared?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/how-a-world-of-warcraft-pandemic-is-helping-a-scientist-fight-coronavirus/vi-BB12oC8z?fbclid=IwAR1c9HmD668eQJ14zzJTZ1QCzWJ_tmUW9SR3L6fWCSZptqtm_0ZktAyQwpg
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/how-a-world-of-warcraft-pandemic-is-helping-a-scientist-fight-coronavirus/vi-BB12oC8z
It doesn't seem to be getting attention, but the novel coronavirus continues to.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/08/a-reflection-on-what-we-have-failed-to-learn-from-past-pandemics/
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