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.