That’s a scary thought.
The species as a whole was much more robust when large fractions of the population were engaged in subsistence farming and we hadn't disbalanced the atmosphere and doomsday weapons didn't exist.
Edit: minor grammar correction
> But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows.
Chickenpox is nowhere near that deadly. Remember the "Simpsons" episode where Maggie gets the chickenpox and Homer hosts a pox party?
If you are contagious on day 2, symptomatic on day 17, and drop dead on day 180, such a disease will happily spread through a population, despite having a 100% fatality rate. There will be no evolutionary pressure for that virus to become less lethal, just like how there's no evolutionary pressure for people to live to 200.
Somebody forgot to tell that to smallpox, which had something like a 25 or 30% IFR before vaccines came around. And there were lots and lots of pandemics of that!
1. Delayed onset of symptoms. That you can spread the disease for a couple days before you first have symptoms has caused so much spreading. If, instead, people were showing symptoms within 12 hours, they'd be much more likely to not be out and about the next day spreading the disease.
2. Wide range of symptoms. Some people felt nearly nothing. Others dealt with it like a minor cold. And others it killed, but not a high enough percentage for most people to take it seriously enough. "Oh, even if I get it, it won't be that big a deal..." kind of thinking. If everyone got at least a "worse than the flu" like reaction to it, everyone would have been taking it more seriously.
There would be almost no antivaxxer sentiment if it killed 20%, because everyone in an area with an outbreak would know someone who died, likely even have seen them sick.
Civilization can survive an awful lot of people dying and even if COVID had a 2% fatality rate it would roll on more or less without a blip. The Spanish flu didn't lead to the fall of civilization anywhere and it killed a lot more people in the prime of their life. COVID deaths are highly concrentrated in the over 50s.
But they're really not. Civilization in Norway survived the Black Death killing 60% of the population. We could regress a great deal in terms of the technology we could apply with large enough fatality rates but if we can still feed large numbers of people and maintain things at all we can keep civilization going. If one third of the US population dropped dead it would have the same population as in the late 1960s. They kept civilization going. Things would get a lot worse for a long time but there'd be no danger of civilizational collapse.
Take away enough technology and you'll still have people, but not so much civilization. In a way, technology is civilization.
Plus it depends on what you mean by civilization. What the Incas built was sophisticated but child's play compared to a modern civilization.
A SARS 1 global pandemic would have probably set back the entire world 50 years or more. Cities would have been abandoned, supply chains destroyed, most likely major wars started due to shortages.
> Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried partial, and often total, immunity to most of these infections with the notable exception of influenza. Falciparum malaria, by far the most severe variant of that plasmodial infection, and yellow fever also crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas.
COVID can be considered a warning shot. If we don't get our house in order, something like SARS-1 or worse will set us back a century (depending a bit on location, but still).
And about five times as many Swedes have died from Covid compared to their Nordic neighbours.
But I do wish people a) understood stats and b) listened to reason not rhetoric.
Things are different now, yes.
It is the quantity and quality of psychological manipulation.
What happened to Germans in 1930s won't repeat again, people are more knowledgeable and less susceptible to mass hypnosis in the 21st century, right?
And bang, all of a sudden there is a menace which didn't exist before. By mere redefinition of what a menace is.
Naturally, the working class still got screwed - either you're "non-essential" and lost your job or were "essential" and ran a risk of contracting COVID that your overlords got to avoid from the comfort of their own home - but it might've helped slow the spread of the virus, some.
That depends quite a bit on how rapidly it spreads. If COVID had started with Omicron's level of infectiousness, it'd have been a dramatically more deadly pandemic.
If the first wave of SARS-Cov-2 was Omicron we'd have seen a worse 1st wave on net, but a far higher survival rate, more population immunity pre-vaccine.. and part of me thinks that the response would have been better, the original SARS-Cov-2 hit a bit of a sweet-spot in terms of political accountability with respect to how slowly it moved across the world and the gradual build up of hospital crisis in most places (1st wave hot-spots excepted of course).
That wasn’t possible in the 90s.