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Researchers Who Once Study WoW's Corrupted Blood Plague Fight Coronavirus
Butcher79
It turns out that their knowledge of the infamous WoW epidemic helped them prepare for the fight against Covid-19.
In 2005, an unexpected plague swept through World of Warcraft, killing entire player servers while Blizzard fought to stop it. Notorious Corrupted Blood incident did not pose any real danger that we are currently facing with the coronavirus Covid-19 , which has killed over 5000 people and infected at least 137 people. But back in 000, the idea of an epidemic in an MMO captivated scientists who played the game. They saw the WoW crisis as a tool to model future epidemics and wrote an article about it . More than a decade later, they are helping to save lives by researching Covid-19.
“I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist, so emerging infectious diseases are kind of a wheelhouse,” says Dr. Eric Lofgren, who is now at the University of Washington, one of the US states hardest hit by the coronavirus. Lofgren's research is focused on "healthcare-associated infections," meaning he and his colleagues are working to understand how badly Covid-19 will impact the U.S. healthcare system. This means collecting and analyzing data on the likelihood of patients being hospitalized and the need to use respirators, as well as the likelihood of spreading infection among doctors and nurses caring for them.
“One of the things that we find if we look at both Wuhan and Italy is there is a huge demand for the healthcare system and that is a really big problem,” he says. "So basically we're confirming that a bunch of hospitals are getting ready right now, and are preparing for the worst."
I thought it would be a stretch to compare Dr. Lofgren's current work on the global epidemic with his previous research paper on World of Warcraft, written back in 2007. But Dr. Lofgren is quick to point out some significant parallels and talks about how his WoW Research (and Play) Time has impacted his current work on Covid-19.
“For me, it was a good illustration of how important it is to understand people's behavior,” he says. “When people react to public health emergencies, how do those reactions actually affect the course of events. We often think of epidemics as something that is with people. There is a virus and it does something. But in fact, it is a virus that spreads between people. and how people interact, behave and obey authority figures, or not, these are all very important things. And also that these things are very chaotic. You can't predict, "Oh yes, everyone will be quarantined." everything will be fine. No, they won't.
Lofgren recently played WoW Classic and says that Corrupted Blood often comes up when people reminisce and hope Blizzard releases a raid preview so it can happen all over again. It may seem a bit painful given the reality of the coronavirus, but he says that these chats and games like Plague Inc. , give people the opportunity to talk about the epidemic and understand it better with some detachment. The 2011 disaster movie Contagion recently hit the top rental charts for the same reason.
The lethality of Corrupted Blood was a real annoyance for players who wanted to visit WoW cities like Ironforge, but it certainly wasn't really dangerous. No real lives were lost. We don't yet know the true death rate of Covid-19, but studies continue to evolve and indicate that initial suggestions that it was slightly worse than the flu were significant underestimations . Dr. Lofgren points out that the problem with the low mortality rate is that it doesn't feel like much: "Except for a small number multiplied by a large number, it can still be really big."
FROM WOW TO TED
Another researcher, Dr. Ran Balitzer, has also written about Corrupted Blood. He is busy studying the coronavirus and sent me his TED speech dated 2018, which addresses the use of games such as WoW in research.
This is not about individual risk, but about the risk you pose to others, whose vulnerability to Covid-19 may not even be visible to you. For those with frequent bronchitis or severe asthma, the elderly and immunocompromised, your small risk can put them at much greater risk.
"Going back to the Corrupted Blood analogy, and something I was thinking about -- one of the critiques that we got from a lot of people, both gamers and scientists, was about this idea of grief," Dr. Lofgren says. . “How mourning is not really analogous to anything that happens in the real world. Humans do not intentionally infect humans. And they may not intentionally making people sick, but deliberately ignoring your potential to make people sick is pretty close. You start seeing people like, “Oh, it doesn't really matter, I'm not going to change my behavior. I'm going to a concert and then I'm going to see my elderly grandmother anyway." Maybe don't do it. This is a big takeaway. Epidemics are a social problem...
I emailed Dr. Nina Fefferman, who co-authored the Bad Blood study and works nationwide with Dr. Lofgren at the University of Tennessee. She says that she also found their research on Azeroth to be invaluable when it comes to understanding the social side of plagues.
“It got me thinking about how people perceive threats and how differences in that perception can change their behavior,” Dr. Fefferman writes. “Most of my work since then has been in trying to build social construction models of risk perception, and I don't think I would have come to that easily if I hadn't spent time thinking about the discussions that WoW players had. in real time about Corrupted Blood and how to proceed in the game based on the understanding they have built from those discussions."
The equivalent of WoW players chatting about how to deal with the virus is now playing out on social media with Covid-19. Dr. Fefferman says all of her current work "focuses on how small decisions by individuals can lead to big changes for the entire population." She is studying how the age of patients and their testing impacts our understanding of how Covid-19 is progressing. So far in the United States, our testing has been extremely limited , and that probably means there are far more cases of Covid-19 than we currently know.
Dr. Lofgren doesn't have good news about the vaccine - expect it to be a very long time coming. The same goes for the likelihood that this coronavirus will recede in a few weeks when winter turns into spring. He says there is little evidence that this virus is seasonal, and early studies using latitude as a measure of temperature are not encouraging. If this really will be seasonal, a sample of influenza or MERSA , which is a coronavirus, may reappear in the fall.
The response this week in the US and many other countries has been to cancel schools, send workers home and ban large public gatherings to prevent the spread of the virus. Dr. Lofgren says that such a strong reaction is actually important: "It is difficult, once the disease is really established in the population, to put this genie back in the bottle."
It may already be too late for that. We could be better prepared to deal with the coronavirus, but “we have reduced our ability to respond to epidemics over the past couple of years,” says Dr. Lofgren. Some leading experts in the field left the US government in 2018, although claims that CDC funding has been cut mislead . But it cannot be denied that the world government was not prepared for this epidemic.
“Blood Corruption was this unexpected black swan event. We treat this [coronavirus] as unexpected, but nature is really good at making people sick,” says Dr. Lofgren. “If you think about the game terms again, we’re making saving throws all the time against new emerging diseases. And sometimes you fail... We have epidemics with some frequency. It's like getting rid of people who predict earthquakes because you haven't had an earthquake in a while. Well, yes, you will have one more. "
The best thing we can all do is to avoid underestimating the gravity of the situation. No, you don't have to hoard toilet paper or face masks (health professionals really need them). Yes, you can leave your home, but consider minimizing travel, not touching your face, not practicing elmo's sneeze And, for God's sake, wash your hands.
And if you need an epidemiologist's advice on how to deal with the loneliness of working alone from home - in person, he suggests a raid. Zul'Gurub, which caused the Corrupted Blood incident, which will be released on WoW Classic in April.
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