Personalized medicine has been a big deal lately, which makes me wonder if perhaps the "weirdness" of COVID-19 is only due to the fact that this disease is being studied at large scale, across the country and the world. It's already known that not everyone reacts to drugs the same way, why would we expect everyone to react to a disease the same way? Western medicine focused on it's successes with a one disease, one drug model, but just like it's obvious one drug doesn't always work for everyone, one disease could affect different people in different ways and could in fact manifest as several different diseases. Possibly if we had studied flu and colds at scale in the population we would have found a wide variety of reactions that would also surprise us.

I also wonder why we seem to never have even tried to cure the flu and colds (there seem to be only a few tiny research groups studying either). We thought mapping the genome was impossible till we tried it. The variety of viruses causing flus and colds caused medicine to make the same claim, impossible to solve because it's so complex, but is it really that complex? We have 100 candidates for a vaccine for what is essentially a cold virus after a few months work. What if we'd started working on colds and flu seriously a few decades ago? Cold and flu cost society tens of billions each year, why have we lived with this disease burden for so long? I'm not an expert but the complexity seems less than that of decoding DNA. Is the fact that colds and flu only kill a few tens of thousands of people a year really a good reason not to eradicate them? The cost/benefit ratio here seems skewed because the benefit seems really high and the cost not so high. For one thing, it could have saved us from this, previous, and future pandemics which have enormous costs.