IW quarantining

[Flyndaran]

Also they'd likely have an uninhabited quarantine world as a stop gap. Nicely set up where first entrants to a new world live for a month or two.
Maybe they could find a world where plagues or even viruses aren't possible.

[thrash]

I figure that the lack of population-destroying virgin field epidemics is largely due to the presence of individual world-jumpers, who have existed since antiquity. Most worlds have been cross-contaminated at some point in the past, leaving only more recent mutations and the occasional outlier that had never been visited before as sources of concern. The biggest problem is that before the development of technology (or similar levels of magic, etc.), jumpers were likely confined to a single continent, which is why the Columbian Exchange was still so devastating.

This is "the dog that didn't bark" in my Time Traveller setting: there haven't been any "Plague of Duskir" incidents on the outworlds, despite fairly lax quarantine standards. If anyone were to think about it and do the simulations for infectious diseases, they would probably realize that there is a channel for inter-world contact besides the jump drive.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

That said, limited quarantine periods make sense, and they don't have to slow the game down much.

GM: "The PCs have 40 days of quarantine to get through, how do they spend it?"

A quarantine period is likely for scouts returning from a new world. For worlds that have been opened up for trade I think they'd only bother if someone actually coming back with symptoms of illness. Otherwise a quick blood test just in case and once the results come back you're done.

[johndallman]

In Infinite Cabal, the characters were worried about this, once they'd got their TL up a bit and understood for sure how infectious disease worked. They learned from Infinity that most bacteria and viruses seemed to die on a transition.

Later they learned that this was Infinity disinformation, and there's much less diversity of diseases between worlds than you might reasonably expect. My Infinity spreads disinformation about this because they really don't understand this lack of diversity and it cuts down on people asking awkward questions.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Later they learned that this was Infinity disinformation, and there's much less diversity of diseases between worlds than you might reasonably expect.

In fact, there is still more than a little controversy about how much you *could* reasonably expect. Genetic sequencing has not clarified the ancestry or divergence timing of many disease organisms as much as we first expected to, so it's still possible to get into debates about whether some pathogen or other has infected humans for 500 years or 50,000. The age of a considerable number of them has been pushed back to at least the Neolithic, so it's perhaps not too startling if anywhere diverging during recorded history shares most of the same diseases. Sure a couple of additional or absent ones wouldn't be too shocking, but broad similarity may not be all that strange in a "realistic" sort of set of alternate histories.

Mind you for Infinite Worlds, the really scary stuff is probably what happens when travelers catch something on worlds where physics and biology don't even work according to the same natural laws. The failure of visitors from Homeline to drop dead instantly on entering those worlds is a bit of a logic problem in the setting as a whole. Something allows travelers to survive when going somewhere human life depends on Elan Vital. So what happens to a disease the drains Elan Vital when you bring it back to Homeline?