An advanced society dealing with a pandemic?

[Maximum7]

For role playing I’m thinking something inspired by the real life Coronovirus pandemic and I was wondering how an advanced society could just completely PHYSICALLY stop it BESIDES quarantine the planet. Here are the stats




1.) The disease is airborne, highly contagious and has a mortality rate of 76%

2.) Their is no vaccine or cure

3.) Their are only small presences of people on other planets. Evacuating people is expensive and not feasible.

I was thinking something like air purification but I don’t know how that can work on a planetary scale.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Maximum7

For role playing I’m thinking something inspired by the real life Coronovirus pandemic and I was wondering how an advanced society could just completely PHYSICALLY stop it BESIDES quarantine the planet. Here are the stats




1.) The disease is airborne, highly contagious and has a mortality rate of 76%

2.) Their is no vaccine or cure

There are at least 4 and I think probably 5 ways in Gurps Bio-tech to give humans Resistance to Disease +8.

If that or other options like the complete Immunity to Known Bacteria nanosymbionts and their companion for Known Viruses won't work then free range nano (or wet nano igineered abctieria) broadcast into the air wouldn't either. You're probably left with sealed environments with draconian air flitering.

[Anaraxes]

We've already got the tech to make RNA vaccines to match a novel virus in about a week. The bottleneck is testing those vaccines. The secondary bottleneck would be manufacturing and distribution. So, the high tech society presumably has improvements in the design of the vaccine, having a much better probability that it performs as expected without the need for such exhaustive testing. The high-tech society also has improved manufacturing, all the way up to nanofac-style creation. (Not that it's hard to replicate RNA/DNA even at TL8.)

You don't need to filter all the air on a planet. If the infectious agent is like an Earthly virus, it doesn't exist anywhere except at the surface level.

You'd want to eradicate those viruses from animal reservoirs as well. High-tech societies are also wealthier, which might mean they could afford to distribute their vaccines even in the wild. (Perhaps you could spray plants, while predators acquire the vaccine from their prey; perhaps you could dose the water supplies; perhaps you create a live virus with mild effects that never-the-less provokes the proper immune response in the animal populatons -- self-replicating doses of medicine. Or perhaps you could deploy swarms of hunter drones with dart guns, because that has an obvious way to go wrong and cause adventure in the followup campaign based on Reign of Steel ;))

High-tech societies might also be able to be more prophylactic about their immunizations. Upon discovery of a coronavirus (to continue the example), they might just start manufacturing vaccines against variants, no doubt aided by more detailed computer models of mutation paths and better knowledge of biochemistry to understand what paths of attack the viruses might have. The population might routinely get vaccines that anticipate a range of potential future infections.

One step further up that path is genetic engineering applied to humans, to improve their overall immune systems at a more fundamental level than just training them disease-by-disease with vaccines. That gets us back to the Biotech methods for Resistance/Immunity to Disease mentioned earlier.

[ericthered]

With heavy automation and abundant robots, you may be able to make quarantine a lot less disruptive.

[LokRobster]

I could see personal bio-hazard suits issued like the way we see face masks. Perhaps even “Make yours at home” suits and filters made with the help of your “mini-fac 8000”. (Every home has one now, right?)

Physical isolation is the first step while bio-science fixes the root cause.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Maximum7

I was thinking something like air purification but I don’t know how that can work on a planetary scale.

Does it have to? You only need to filter the air where the people are. If all the buildings are already sealed and the air recycled anyway (likely enough on other planets in a realistic setting, since breathable atmospheres are probably close to non-existent) that might even be fairly easy.

Some other options, depending on what your setting has:
Engineer something that blocks the receptor sites the virus uses to get into cells. It's still around, even in the bloodstream of the infected, so this isn't exactly a cure, it just can't reproduce. Of course those receptors presumably do something useful in the first place, but hopefully losing it is less fatal than the virus.

Nanotech that actively hunts the virus, either in humans or the environment as a whole. Essentially instead of trying to construct a vaccine that provokes immune systems to attack the virus, build the attacker directly.

Put everybody on the infected planet(s) into suspended animation until you have a cure.

Upload everybody, vaporize the entire biosphere, including their no longer necessary bodies, and live in virtuality. Or build new bodies and download into them I guess.

Upgrade your transporter biofilters to rearrange the virus into a symbiote that gives everyone super powers. What? It makes as much sense as other things transporters do in this setting, right?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by ericthered

With heavy automation and abundant robots, you may be able to make quarantine a lot less disruptive.

But boy would culture take a hit after a while of such extreme isolation.

I once imagined a post apocalypse world where robots start to take over. Not because humans are gone, but because humans hid in arcologies and are now afraid to reenter the world at large.

(I have to say that as a socially phobic agoraphobe, reactions to this pandemic are a bit different than I would have imagined.)

[Michele]

Even without a cure or a vaccine, and without personal protection equipment save for health workers, and without quarantine, and without TL9 geegaws, an advanced society could cope quite well if a fast, reliable testing system was available in huge quantities, together with the obvious tracking technology.

If you get tested every time you arrive at work or at a social meeting, and every time you leave those places, and the authorities get your result in minutes, and if it's easy to verify who you met in every single instant of your day, the victims can be quickly isolated and the chain of contagion interrupted. Quarantine would still take place, but for those individuals who met a contagious person, not for the whole planet.

[Flyndaran]

That would require a society with virtually zero privacy, and a very focused, powerful, and somewhat draconian government. Certainly possible, but it would come with other setting effects that should be taken into account, IMO.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

But boy would culture take a hit after a while of such extreme isolation.

I once imagined a post apocalypse world where robots start to take over. Not because humans are gone, but because humans hid in arcologies and are now afraid to reenter the world at large.

(I have to say that as a socially phobic agoraphobe, reactions to this pandemic are a bit different than I would have imagined.)

Telecommuting, teleconferencing, and practical VR can take care of quite a lot of that. They'd need the infrastructure to already be in place or the ability to build it rapidly, but even a 'mere' GURPS TL 10 can run a vibrant cultural scene, innovative manufacturing industry, and overall chatty society from the saftey of their VR couches.

Originally Posted by Michele

Even without a cure or a vaccine, and without personal protection equipment save for health workers, and without quarantine, and without TL9 geegaws, an advanced society could cope quite well if a fast, reliable testing system was available in huge quantities, together with the obvious tracking technology.

That's one solution, but with an 76% death rate, I know which of the two solutions in this post I'd take.