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Asked by anon-266969 to Melanie on 5 Nov 2020.
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Melanie S. answered on 5 Nov 2020:
Hi! A virus expert might be able to give you a better answer, but out of the viruses I’ve read about, I think the deadliest one might be Marburg virus. It’s not *that* common, but when people get it, they almost certainly die within ~10 days, and (as far as I know) there are currently no treatments or cures for it yet.
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Comments
Sarah commented on :
I think it depends on how you define the “most” deadly. By the total number of people killed in recent years, HIV killed over 30 million since the 1980’s. Or rabies, which is 100% fatal if untreated within a relatively short period of time. But if you look historically, my first thought was smallpox. It’s estimated that 1 in every 3 infected people died from it, and it likely decimated populations in the Americas.
I am not an infectious disease expert though!
Romain commented on :
Hi, as indicated above, yes, I think smallpox was very deadly! But also, you need to think about what deadly can mean. Is it related to how likely one is to die from the infection once they catch it? Or is it over the years it’s been active and causing disease because we don’t have a vaccine yet? It’s quite a different to address with bugs in reality. You might be worried here about terrorists using viruses (some Hollywood movies talk about this scenario!), although this is a potential risk, it’s something that very talented researchers are working very hard to prevent!
Covid of course today, is very bad for many people across the world but it is not very deadly unless you are already at risk. To protect those people at risk, this is why we need to keep respecting social distancing and wearing masks etc.