I would argue Russian flu Richard Preston made the case 30 years ago that a successful pathogen is one that increases your participation in its vectors without slowing you down. Evolutionarily speaking, a virus that gives you a runny nose and a cough but doesn't make you skip work is a winner. A virus that kills you and all your friends? Yeah, that's a dead end. And yeah. The CDC is now FEMA but worse. All the hand sanitizer. All the clorox wipes. All the bullshit. One of the cook groups was literally giving away four truckloads of hand sanitizer to anyone who would haul it off because of course they were. Imagine what the past 4 years would have been like with an actual pandemic response team in place.First, our best recent comparator is the Spanish flu.
Totally agree, but I specifically didn’t mention the Russian flu, because it is highly suspected that the Russian flu was actually a Corona virus that may now live on as a cause of the cold. I went Spanish flu because it’s more recent and we know beyond doubt that it was a flu, so it was a good compare/contrast case in my mind. Flu pandemics shaped the initial covid response and lo and behold, we basically wiped out flu in the winter of 2020-2021. Sadly, we weren’t dealing with a droplet but an aerosol transmission, so standing 6 ft apart does fuckall if you’re sharing air. The data were there is February and March, but the CDC had made their choices and there was no trove of data that we’re going to convince them to follow the evidence.