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Notes -
At this point, the medical establishment and government don’t (or at least, I really, really hope they don’t) have enough credibility left to enforce anti-pandemic measures. Even if avian flu does become a human pandemic and is widely acknowledged as such, it’s probably just going to have to rip through the population like any other transmittable disease. Those who get sick, get sick; those who die, die; and those who survive eventually reach herd immunity.
People in Medicine are really nervous, you are right that public health entities burned through basically all the credibility they had last time, but at current expectations this Avian flu would be be worse than COVID and U.S. healthcare (and likely everywhere else) has basically burned through every ounce of slack it had including things like people's willingness to work and mental health. A lot of COVID-denier types were able to miss just how close we were to total collapse because everyone was locked up at home but this could be really, really bad.
As demonstrated elsewhere in this thread, support for lockdowns/masks/precautions is very low, and even traditional supporters are going to be banging the economic drum.
This will likely kill much more young people before whatever crazy new technology we have gets approved and rolled out. At least thats the feeling.
I think it may be a bit doomer but the worse than COVID and COVID exhaustion bits are very real.
I'm not concerned about the apocalypse, even without any further technology changes but I am concerned about stuff like people dying at their homes of heart attacks because ambulances are overstretched and we don't have the resources in the ED or hospital to handle otherwise treatable problems.
Like with COVD damage to the complex systems involved will take a long time to clear, if ever.
This still isn’t the Black Death 2.0. Literal worst case scenarios are still nowhere near what the virus was sold as.
Society didn't end and wasn't going to, but we did almost lose access to healthcare which is quite a bad outcome.
We weren’t going to lose access to healthcare, we were going to get healthcare rationed. Not that bad, or anywhere near bad enough to justify the lunatic reaction to it.
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