> In the 14th century, the Black Plague devastated Europe. It's impossible to know but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that as much as HALF the population was killed.

If all the variants are to completely overwhelm all the vaccines and treatments (that did not exist then) to render them all ineffective and create this devastation over the next 100 years, time will only tell if half the world will be killed. As of now, we are pretty far from that (but most of the century from the first cases has yet to play out).

> wealth will ultimately get redistributed one way or another.

I agree with what you are saying.

> The ultimate forms of wealth distribution are revolution and war and that's really in nobody's best interests.

I don't necessarily disagree, but is there some kind of shared "best interests" concept that everyone agrees on here that would make the "nobody" true? Are we excluding those who enable war (even to varying degrees) without taking on the higher risk of such (higher share of future resources from those who no longer are around to compete for such, by getting others to take on the higher risk of not being around for such future resources instead of one themselves)?

> It's actually good for everyone if the masses aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck.

This will be largely bounded by whether any given society has enough resources at its disposal to offer an "acceptable" standard of living, the resources to allocate such standard without squandering it between its intended destination, and the choices individual actors make with the current varying resources they have their disposal (not strictly bounded by the physical, but also by those intangible like "knowledge" of cheaper resource allocation in adverse environments).