About 1.1% of blood donors in Puerto Rico are testing positive for the Zika virus. The blood screening suggests that about 25% of the island’s population will catch Zika this year.
The Zika virus is spreading “rapidly” in Puerto Rico and now likely afflicts 2% of the island’s population with active infections, public health officials reported on Friday, based on tests of blood donors.
At current infection rates, one-quarter of the island’s 3.5 million people will eventually acquire the mosquito-borne illness, U.S. CDC officials said. Current estimates are that 1% to 13% of babies born to women infected with Zika during pregnancy will suffer from microcephaly, a severe shrunken brain and skull syndrome.
And it might be lysogenic, like Herpes, meaning that once infected, it doesn’t go away, so the risk of damage to all potential offspring would not abate with time. Look for the rates of homosexuality and promiscuity to decline precipitously among the normal, and to rise dramatically among the microcephalic.
The thing is, right now it could be flashing through the promiscuous population, while barely moving among the chaste. They are assuming mosquito transmission, however it could be spreading faster, or even mostly through sexual transmission. If so, by the end of the year the numbers could be more like 100% of the highly sexually promiscuous infected, and only 1% of the monogamous.
Once you get up to the colder climes like Detroit, Chicago, or New York, mosquito transmission may hardly occur at all, meaning all transmission will be sexual, and the promiscuous may end up carrying a major Darwinian disadvantage.
It’s a K-selected world.
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