That's probably because it was not that great impact wise. If it was more like the Spanish Flu, with a huge death toll across all ages (as opposed to 1/10th the death toll, and mostly focused on older people and co-morbidities) it would have absolutely have looked like "a pandemic film".
It's our response to covid, not covid itself, that taught me a lot of what we're capable of in global crisis. We've come a long way since Spanish Flu.
Everyone worked really hard to make the impact minimal, now people assume that it wasn’t that big a deal.
It's a case of:
-- Why do you spend all these millions putting these plastic scarecrows all across Nebraska?
-- They keep sharks away.
-- But Nebraska doesn't have sharks!
-- Exactly! See how effective it is?
Only in this case you are looking at denials where “propter hoc” actually holds — the second thing really was caused by the first.
There really should be a catchy name for this, since it permeates a lot of political reasoning on topics such as remediation for ozone hole depletion, FDC regulations, environmental regulations, etc. People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.
Depending on the situation, 2 cases are possible (and have happened):
(a) A thing was indeed about to become a grave problem and timely action prevented it.
(b) A thing was never to become a big issue, and all the action spent preventing it didn't have any significance.
In both cases the outcome is "thing didn't become a big problem".
But in (a) action is what helped with this, and in (b) action was irrelevant and wasted.
Now some people see the outcome (no issue) and think that action was wasted. That's accurate in (a) and wrong in (b).
My point is that whether "timely action averted a problem" or "the problem was oversold to begin with" is something to be argued and proved, not taken for granted.
You can argue that we didn’t need to pump hundreds of millions into it; but it is a fact that there would have been a crisis had it not been actively averted.
The same issue exists now with 2048 and we’re already seeing problems (on things that date far into the future) and we will likely need to expend effort and energy in avoiding this issue: especially on embedded devices.
If you’re denying that there would have been a problem then I’m afraid you’re simply mistaken.
I could give you many citations if I wasn’t on my phone. There was even a documentary about it.
“Was the millennium bug a myth” or something.
Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.
(An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)
But if I am not mistaken, from a strictly evolutionary perspective there is no pressure towards such a disease — a genetic variation that is more deadly won’t dominate over its less deadly variant and thus deadliness could be a variable that only changes randomly from the initial level (and decreasing if it is actively detrimental to spreading, where I would say that in case of a human population deadliness does correspond with fear).
But IANAE, nor a mathematician.
Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms.
The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect the spread.
Ebola fails to spread, not because it's deadly, but because the symptoms are almost immediate and dramatic.
(I took graduate level course in the mathematics of epidemiology and got an A, which makes me no expert at all, but this is fairly fundamental.)
He is not completely off the ball, though. Our immune systems are rather good, so (with significant exceptions like HIV) if some virus doesn't kill us quickly, we tend to clear it out of the organism or at least get it under control, so it won't kill us at all.
Viruses that are very deadly but take a long time to kill you (thus enhancing the risk of transmission), like HIV, aren't very typical.
If covid had a 1 in 10 chance of killing me I would have made very different decisions over the course of the pandemic. You're saying that people would still behave the same as they did during covid no matter how deadly a given disease is, which seems pretty ridiculous.
Yes, a third of the country didn't go through the effort and a lot of people died in those states also. The country might still be functioning, but not necessarily well, with significant labor shortages, supply chain issues, high inflation, a looming recession, record high gas prices, etc. (not all of that is directly because of the pandemic, granted, but it sure didn't help).
I'm not so sure, given places that did nothing or not much (either out of policy or lack of resources) and still didn't have a toll anywhere comparable to the Spanish Flu (and more or less comparable to places that took "great effort", if not better).
I'm very much for vaccines, but this is just not true at all. Covid was never going to be near as bad as the Spanish flu, even if no measures were taken at all.