What do computer viruses teach us about #COVIDー19? I don't think anything, but in this thread I'm going to try to draw corollaries anyway, because cyber.
"Don't touch your face" is stupid advice, just like "don't open suspicious attachments" or "don't click on suspicious links in emails". Email is designed to have attachments and links, asking people to not use the product as designed is nonsense.
This video went viral (sic) of a health official advising people to not touch their face as she, and the people behind her, touch their faces. People are going to click on email links and touch their faces.
"Wash your hands" may be better advice. Whereas touching your face is unconscious and largely beyond your control, you wash your hands. Or at least, wash your hands more.
People aren't going to wash their hands enough to stop the disease from spreading. However, if we can get people to wash their hands 20% more, it'll slow the spread of the disease by some amount.
Various measures will have compounding effects. If sick people wore surgical masks, if schools closed, if people washed their hands more often, if more people worked from home, and so on ... this can dramatically slow the spread of the disease.
When each infected computer/person infects, on average more than one other, then the virus is spreading. When on average fewer than one more is infected, then it's no longer spreading. Minor efforts can bring it down from 1.1 to 0.9, and that's all the difference.
Who is to blame for #COVIDー19? For computer viruses, the answer is "your favorite enemy". Maybe it's corporations who don't patch. Maybe it's a foreign government that nominally gives support to the hacker who launched it.
For #COVIDー19, many are blaming the Chinese, blaming weird practices like eating bats, and so on. Yes, it's offensively racist. But this is also offensively stupid. Zoonotic viruses are 4 times more likely to come from China than the US because they have 4 times the population.
The model most people use is "cooties", the way children are paranoid by disease. They don't understand it, so they are convinced it's transmitted by the equivalent of magic. Many articles describe the Wuhan market as "dirty" and "unsanitary". I'm not sure that's a thing.
People in crowded market will spread #COVIDー19 just the same regardless if it's sanitary or unsanitary. Other than the issue of bringing lots of animals in close contact with lots of humans, I can't see how "sanitary" applies here.
Same with computer viruses. How they propagate is very clear, yet people insist on ignorance, treating them as "cooties", as something that cannot be understood with logic but only with their own prejudices.
We know how to limit computer worms from spreading, with firewalls and patching. It seems we know how to limit #COVIDー19 from spreading: everyone interact with fewer people. It's not really magic.
Conversely, we know from computer worms that if you DON'T do these things, you WILL be infected. That's probably the biggest prediction I could make here: without "social distancing", the coronavirus WILL spread throughout our country like it did Wuhan.
If you put a computer vulnerable to the ETERNALBLUE exploit on the public Internet it'll become infected within an hour. I suspect the U.S., or any country, is the same: if business as usual, it will spread.
...unless the heat of summer slows spreading like it does some other viruses, in which case we'll see it tick up again in the winter.
