The modern flu kills in the neighborhood of 12k-61k Americans every year. The Spanish Flu was killing into the six-digit totals, around 600k between 1917 and 1918.
That's "less lethal" in both an absolute sense and a per-capita sense. But its a far cry from non-lethal. Its also a serious shift in expectations. I'm old enough to remember Op-Eds about the value of ending Influenza like we've ended Small Pox and Polio. Now we're getting articles that are pure Learned Helplessness. Just sorta shrugging and surrendering to a virus that - purely on WSJ-idiolized GDP terms - is carving out huge chunks of the economy annually, in the fanciful hope that next year we'll be marginally better off than the last one.
The modern flu kills in the neighborhood of 12k-61k Americans every year. The Spanish Flu was killing into the six-digit totals, around 600k between 1917 and 1918.
That's "less lethal" in both an absolute sense and a per-capita sense. But its a far cry from non-lethal. Its also a serious shift in expectations. I'm old enough to remember Op-Eds about the value of ending Influenza like we've ended Small Pox and Polio. Now we're getting articles that are pure Learned Helplessness. Just sorta shrugging and surrendering to a virus that - purely on WSJ-idiolized GDP terms - is carving out huge chunks of the economy annually, in the fanciful hope that next year we'll be marginally better off than the last one.