The world is not ending...

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The bottom line is: the COVID Pandemic is pretty bad, no matter how you slice it.

It's like saying 20 million killed is a "lesser" genocide than 30 million killed.

Yeah that's not really what the conversation above was about, it was more an assessment on the state of our institutions.

The "conversation" is about the fact that the world is not ending----and the evidence for this thereof.

The "state of our institutions" from many viewpoints, even in "good" times leaves much to be desired. I am one who seeks not to rely upon "institutions" (though, it must be said that I work for an "institution").

There's too much of this stringent "staying on topic" stuff around here. I kept to the topic, while putting in my two cents about the significance of the COVID Pandemic versus the Spanish Flu Pandemic.

Noted then - it was an unrelated side comment that wasn't intended to weigh in.

^You are a person who studies a great deal and has a scholarly viewpoint on things. I admire that.

It's been alleged that I "stray from topics" and that sort of thing. One can be "on topic" while not addressing, in a linear and direct way, the topic at hand. There could be a peripheral connection to the topic which is, nevertheless, quite relevant to the topic.

There's a TV show called "Connections" which speaks about how peripheral things can make direct things richer.

If one doesn't use inductive reasoning in addition to deductive reasoning, one often fails to arrive at a "truth." One only gets a two-dimensional viewpoint of things.

Anyway....sorry for the digression

Well... there's also the nature of the dialog that one stumbles into - and I don't mean that pedantically about the nature of the thread or in the spirit of demanding strict adherence to the last post.

^That makes good sense.

The key....is specific context.

I agree with this. We would do well to remember, though, that the Earth had a significantly smaller population back then.

If the population of the world was 8 billion in 1348, at least a billion or so would have died of the Plague.

Are you suggesting that survival but with permanent, very serious health issues ISN'T a possibility with Covid-19?

If so I think you are being very naive.

Of course the *world* isn't going to end. It's going to continue to exist after all humans have killed themselves for centuries. Just like it continued to exist after the dinosaurs were killed, except unlike humans they lived for millions of years and didn't deserve it.

In a hundred years all of us right now will be dead and no one will remember us, unless we get really famous or infamous, in a hurry. There's nothing we can do about it. Such as is our sad destiny.

Yeas, I know, edgy.

It's just gonna keep on going, and going.

Sounds like a savvy interpretation - I'll give it to ya whether or not it's what I meant.

I’m sure Tech has been studying COVID very carefully, and knows it’s potential seriousness.

It’s a weird disease, really.

I both have and haven't, part of it's been that there has been high quality information in some corners and also - I've been working a lot lately, 100+ hours per week over the summer and rarely getting under 60.

What I am familiar with is that for the most part what was hitting China and Italy early on was not what we got in the US, that it did mutate and step-down in it's intensity - which is the normal direction of adaptive pressure for novel viruses. I think that's where, at least locally, the emergency seems like it was mostly the number of people all hitting the health system at once and that goes with the caveat that people over 70 and particularly in their 80's indeed had a fight for their lives that could go in either direction, for most people younger than that it was comorbid conditions.

One of the ways in which the Spanish flu was indeed different, and I'm lifting this right now from Google's up-front blurb about it from the CDC:



In that sense it was much more cross-demographic and everyone had the same reasons to worry as seniors do with Covid. With Covid at least younger people could go out, work, and if they were careful to keep a distance from their parents or grandparents their odds are relatively good if they were cautious, the knock-on effects of something like Spanish flu considering the demographics would be a lot worse for really shutting down the economy, forcing a shelter in place much longer, even right now for what economic damage we've gotten - and it's bad make no mistake - it would have been far worse in the later scenario. That's where you also get breakdown of the global food supply chain, accelerated starvation and warfare in developing countries, all kinds of effects that are as bad or worse than the illness causing the shutdown. We've had some of what I just mentioned happening in Covid causing famines in Africa, thankfully with only a partial rather than full shutdown.

This is part of why we'll have to be increasingly mindful that we live in a global civilization, that something from any corner of the globe can make it around the world several times in a week particularly if it catches the business flights. We're also headed toward an age of relatively inexpensive synthetic biology which will amplify the risk of misanthrops and even incautious hackers unleashing major problems.

Indeed. There is a greater range of responses to it than with most infections. Ranging from no symptoms at all...all of the way up to...DEATH, and every shade and gradation of temporary and or permanent trauma in between.