Semi-related: Thinking about this era I wondered how long it look for AIDS to kill 100,000 Americans. The answer is about 5 years. CoViD did it in 5 months.
Yet we still have biology teachers the school I work at asking why we shut down for Corona/Covid and not HIV/Aids. He's a fucking biology teacher, and he refuses to see the difference because he wants his precious soccer team to play this year. It's so damn frustrating, especially knowing that nothing will happen to him because he's a coach.
But even a tiny mortality rate is catastrophic when talking about city and country sized populations. The lockdowns happened for a reason, because this disease overwhelms public health.
Indeed, mass panic is an under appreciated risk in the discourse in some countries. We may have the misfortune of discovering just what that looks like in the coming months.
Only most of recently infected have no symptoms, whereas most of infected do develop symptoms, but typically after they already transmitted the illness to other people. According to what it is currently known, from all infected around 80% do eventually develop some symptoms, up to 10% need hospital, up to 5% need intensive care and around 1% of all infected eventually die. That is when observed across all age groups, among the older it's much worse.
And as soon as the health system can't cope the percentages of dead increase rapidly to even higher values -- i.e. those that need hospital need it because half of them will need intensive care (and nobody knows before it's critical who), those that need intensive care need it because most of them will need oxygen in some form and half of these will need:
I wonder what HIV would have done if it hit before mass adoption of protective equipment for sex. I think it could have brought civilization to it's knees.
I’m not sure that prophylactics really would be the deciding factor. Condoms are older than you might think, but on the other hand usage rates are still relatively low.
And humanity keeps bouncing back from things: for example, the plague (multiple times!)
I think the relatively long incubation time is probably what would have made it especially bad if it had taken hold earlier - say, in the 1800s when our understanding would have been limited and our ability to track it worse. It might have been much, much worse then.
I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that was bitching that the government was spending way too much money on AID's research instead of important things like heart disease.
I read that, looked at their statistics and backed out an estimate of number of years of life lost for AID and Heart disease. And yeah AID's was a really big deal unless you were a sociopathic old white male editor at the WSJ.
Reading what the Wall Street Journal thinks about SARS-COV2 shows they haven't changed a bit in 35 years.