Bacteria with cell walls and shit that can form spores can live a long time on a metal surface Viruses are just these little oily bubbles of shit, they're delicate, they come apart real easy from various kinds of physical stress
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(The main famous disease you get from sharing clothes and bedsheets, the bubonic plague, which is one of the diseases that inspired the invention of the term "fomite", is a bacterium And moreover it's a bacterium that lives inside a multicellular parasite, fleas)
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Anyway the tradeoff when you're playing the bad guy in Plague Inc. is that viruses grow faster and they're much harder to treat, but they're very delicate outside a host and rely a lot on flying under the radar
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Bacteria are much hardier and more flexible, it's just that a bacterial infection takes more time to take root and humans have a lot more ways to fight back (antibiotics) -- bigger and more complex organism means it has more weaknesses as well as abilities
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But this is why the "bioweapon" theory for COVID-19 was always obnoxious I mean there are some advantages to making your bioweapon a virus but tons of disadvantages -- the fact that the only way to keep the virus "alive" and spread it around in large numbers is in human hosts
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Whenever people really seriously talked about using biological agents for terrorism etc. it was bacteria for the most part, talking about anthrax or botulinum or whatnot The stuff about weaponized Ebola etc is way more speculative
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(And yes, it is well documented the British *intended* to use fomite transmission to give Native tribes smallpox by giving them blankets used by smallpox victims But they didn't know much about disease back then, and it's questionable if this actually worked)
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(It had a higher chance of working, because smallpox is a skin disease and infected skin cells get shed a lot more and last a lot longer than a virus that mostly sticks to the respiratory tract)
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Hep C is the only major exception I can think of and it's why hygiene is extremely important when using any sort of needle.
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I am a big dumb dumb but to me it sort of seems like an obvious starting point that a virus that makes you cough a lot probably wants you to cough because it spreads mostly by coughing
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