The COMPVIS19 Shrink-O-Virus

Medical condition / Computer virus

A virulant infection that turned into a pandemic during the Spice Renaissance era of the Blooperverse

Blooperverse characters can be injured and get sick. Their CGI nature also makes them vulnerable to computer malware. Such malware can delete, compress, encrypt fragment, truncate (... and so on...) Character files. The COMPVIS19 is one such malware.

Onset:

During the first few days after contact the character should be considered both infected and contagious. Symptoms may take up to 10 days to appear or be noticed.

Symptoms and Diagnosis:

As any infection COMPVIS19 can cause fever, coughing, sneezing, sniffles, cooties, loss of apetite, head-ache, heart-ache, digestive issues, diarhea and dermatitis. The most distinctive symptom which usually leads to self-diagnosis is loss of body-mass. The character will lose fat, muscle mass and even shrink in height.

Prognosis:

Severity of COMPVIS19 varies. Some characters will only suffer the loss of body mass and/or shrinking effects for a duration of 2 to 14 days, after which they would be considered recovered. The recovered character can, in some cases, still be a carrier and should submit itself to a malware-scan.

More acute cases, defined as having loss of body-mass symptoms lasting longer than 14 days or causing the character to be weakened to the point of requiring hospitalization happen in about 10% of documented infections.

The virus can cause death or deletion if the infected character shrinks to nothingness or becomes weakened beyond the possibility of recovery.

Treatment:

There are no official treatment to the Shrink-O-Virus. In some cases, force feeding can help alleviate the effects of weight loss. Resistance training is also said to help recovering muscle mass but Height-loss seems to be definitive.

Immunity:

No Immunization method or program is currently available. Characters have been known to relapse and/or be reinfected mere weeks after their initial recovery.