Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference?
It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”
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.