In no universe will the current pandemic ever get within two orders of magnitude of the death rate from the historical plague.

The Black Death was in Europe for every year from 1346 and 1671 it was only extremely deadly from 1346 to 1353. COVID could mutate in to a much worse variety over that timeframe. Modern medicine can do quite a bit, but it doesn’t handle true plages very well beyond social distancing.

If the only way to actually slow transmission was the equivalent of biosafety level 4 or 5 and 1/2 of all infected die without significant medical care, everything falls apart. Even just an unusually long incubation period could be devastating.

Are you telling me that the worst version of the Black Death was 3-4 orders of magnitude more deadly than previous strains? Because that’s what would have to happen to this coronavirus for the scenario you are talking about. If this is even remotely possible, then I assume we should also be worried about the influenza virus, or really any other common household pathogen, because who knows what it could mutate into.

Or maybe you should keep your doomsday theories to yourself.

Even with modern medical care the worst version of influenza had approximately 60% fatality rate (H5N1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1

COVID is already significantly more dangerous than normal Influenza so making that kind of jump is far from impossible

> It’s probably going to be ok, but assuming it stays equally as deadly over time is perhaps optimistic.

No where did I make this assumption, or was I alluding that this may be the case. Even in stats you can see cyclic patterns, with case counts and even with Empl-Pop ratio used in the article.