Yes, the flu, we deal with it, it raises our mortality rates and costs billions of dollars a year, but we deal. COVID just raises our mortality rate more and costs even more money to keep in check. Society isn’t going to collapse, but of course, it can’t ignore the problem, either.

This is the first widespread pandemic in most of our lifetimes, but definitely not the first one. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was much worse and disruptive than this.

Yeah, and whenever there was a pandemic in the past there was a heightened period of death and typically poor economic conditions for a while. It’s not as if pandemics haven’t happened before; they have, and they have devastating consequences which is why we’re so proactive about them.

People will locally optimize in the absence of government intervention, which means lockdown-like conditions are inevitable as people simply stop going to work in large enough numbers they cannot be replaced.

Civilization is still able to deal. Maybe not to your satisfaction, but it's still able to deal.

We could go back to what they did in 1347, during the Bubonic plague, and cover our bodies in a robe from head to toe and wear beaked masks stuffed with herbs, spices and straws to filter the air, and examine people using only a cane to keep their distance, like doctors did back then.

https://www.republicworld.com/entertainment-news/whats-viral...

Just that it was sporadic not large amount of the workforce at once and for long stretches.

"Sick" is not a binary state

Not as many and not as coordinated.