Upvote:1
People can only be led to believe such nonsense because they forgot the sense of what were real plagues variola, tuberculosis, polio, or the black death itself. Compared with these, covid is less than nothing, totally, utterly, irrelevant. People from just 100y ago would laugh on our face about our stress about it.
Even untreated covid is just ~ 2 or 3 times more lethal than common flu, and with early treatment covid kills even less than flu. (all politicians still pushing against early treatment are corrupted crisis-surfers or guilty of high treason). Moreover, USA CDC said that twice as much children died from flu than from covid this year. Compare with polio or variola.
If covid would appear in 1800, before viruses were known, people would not even notice, because the proportion of old people were smaller, and the increase of deaths would not be noticeable. Even if the proportion of old people were the same as today, a few % more deaths is just a bad year. Even in Italy, that the media painted as hell on earth, 600K people die every year, and 2020 was not even the worse flu season in terms of deaths from respiratory diseases, as a few years ago there were more respiratory deaths in the usual flu season (2017-18?). Besides, Italy today is an unbelievably geriatric country, with one of the worse intensive case units per capita values in Europe.
Variola could kill between 20% and 70%, Tuberculosis ~20%, Black Death ~30%. And note that such averages hide the fact that some places are more affected than others.
A French friend has land near Castres, Languedoc. On her land, there are ruins from a XVII or XVIII c. village, around 5 houses with some extra buildings, which they know to have been suddenly abandoned. People assume that it was due to some war, but this could easily happen due to a variola or tuberculosis epidemic - all of them died, or at least so few people were left that it become impractical to live in the village. Some years ago on English TV there were a report about a four-families hamlet abandoned on early XX c due to tuberculosis. They showed a bronze plaque placed there by relatives stating that all 5 members of the same family died together.
These are real "biblical plagues", not anything that is even remotely comparable with or in the same order of magnitude as the usual flu.
Mostly, large cities could not have positive natural population growth until modern sanitation and medicine were developed - the cities had to have a constant influx of migrants to keep their population. It is hard to separate the effects of sanitation, medicine, and vaccination, but having many cities with millions of people where the population still grows naturally is a modern phenomenon. There are even some people who wonder how we could keep cities such as NYC in existence if variola were to reappear, or if a 100%-resistant tuberculosis were to appear.