[anshorei]

There's two major metrics to measure the severeness: the mortality rate and the infection rate. I think that "we haven't had the level of death we had in 1918 so the pandemic is less severe" ignores the fact that COVID-19 is far more infectious and therefore in a sense more severe since it will be awfully hard to get rid of for that reason (if we can indeed never get rid of it the number of deaths will keep growing, so might eventually catch up)

[piva00]

Varicella is more infectious than SARS-CoV-2 and it's under control with vaccines, same pattern: spread through the air, R0 chickenpox > R0 COVID-19, vaccines help with immunity and even when infected developing a mild version of the disease.

There is hope, we might not get rid off it but if we could control chickenpox that is quite more infectious, we can have a little hope. Even more with more modern medicine.

[mdp2021]

> Varicella is more infectious than SARS-CoV-2

Well. So it was in our tentative models at the time of this author's writing (8 days). So it is not any more, as of a few days only (3 days).

...Ray Kurzweil was right. /Bitter Joke.