How hard would it be to weaponize the Corona Virus now that many countries around the world have access to it?

Not sure anybody would want that.
The thing with very contagious virusses is that they are very contagious.
In other words, it’ll bite you in your own ass fairly quickly (at least, sooner rather than later, it will, period).
Only if you have medicine to battle it, or protect you (and your people) it might be a weapon, but it would be a dead give away who was behind it, when all your enemies have died, but you (and your people) are still standing.

Bio-warfare is always a possibility but I think in this case it’s unlikely.

It’s a weak arsed virus that can be eradicated by basic hygiene…wash your hands people!
So as a weapon, be as much use as a pea shooter or water pistol.

Every reason to believe it’s not much more deadly than the average flu. I dint think this is the virus to pick if you want to really damage a country.

As to weaponizing it, I’d think if someone has access to labs doing the testing they could easily get a significant amount of the virus and just spread it on frequently touched surfaces in large cities and airports, and it would take off. Most airports you can actually get through without touching much. The most touch is probably the bins for TSA.

@ucme “So as a weapon, be as much use as a pea shooter or water pistol.”

It’s crippling the Chinese economy. Perhaps they (meaning the evil state or terrorist) don’t want a virus that kills every human on the planet. Your argument is kind of like saying normal bombs are useless in war because we have nukes. With a weapon like this, you could short the markets, unleash a pandemic, and get obscenely wealthy without annihilating mankind.

What makes you think that they haven’t already? It wouldn’t surprise me if some of our US Defense Department tech labs – and those of other countries – already are working on it.

@gorillapaws No, you really couldn’t :D
Your argument is based on fear spread by global media, It’s a virus that is easy to contain & poses zero threat at all.

CRISPR tech is not hard to master and is unregulated at this point. That can enable designer viruses with specific characteristics.

I won’t be surprised when some nutcase or terrorist cooks a very nasty thing in the basement.
We can only hope we find out when that person is found dead in his or her basement, not when the nasty thing gets out.

It would be more efficient to weaponize the flu virus instead of some as yet not specifically named/designated corona virus. There have been other corona viruses, and there will probably be more. Don’t sweat it…

@dabbler “CRISPR tech is not hard to master and is unregulated at this point. That can enable designer viruses with specific characteristics.”

Wow, that’s pretty terrifying. I didn’t realize that this kind of thing existed beyond government labs or tightly-controlled advanced university research.

@ucme China deliberately hid the news about Corona until it got out of the country. There is a reason why they were so slow to react in the early days of the news and still allowed people from the infected place to travel. The virus sounded rather lame to me, but when a country had to hide it for fear of the economy being crashed that says something.

And yeah, because they didn’t do much about it, it spread out to this point.