COVID-19 had the 5th worst death toll of any pandemic in human history, and is in the top 10 of global population lost. And that was with modern medicine and (with some Republican political exceptions) reasonably aggressive global response.
COVID-19 was bad, worse than most people seem to remember. I've got a pandemic-trained MCE expert in my family. Everyone saw it coming when they saw the numbers, and it happened worse than expected. Hospitals overflowing capacity from just critical cases. Tent hospitals being built. They fucking activated the mass-grave contracts to store the bodies. For the first time in nearly a century. Bet you didn't know that. OEMS doesn't publish actions like that because they don't want to cause further panic. It comes through a private email to paramedics (and, fwiw I thought this part silly, sent under a pseudonym that only people in the field would recognize)
For the record (not that I think you actually care about facts, but I'm putting this up there for neutral observers), the deadliness of a pandemic is not primarily driven by its death rate. Only an ignorant person would look to that first. A virus with a 0.1% death rate could end humankind. Many viruses with high death rates have less of an impact. Potentially more important factors are the spread rate (influenced by the incubation rate and contagiousness window), and immunity rates (both inherent immunity and acquired immunity). That COVID-19 was a COVID family of illness (cold family, no known cures, treatments, or immunization paths) made it worse.
COVID-19 had the 5th worst death toll of any pandemic in human history, and is in the top 10 of global population lost. And that was with modern medicine and (with some Republican political exceptions) reasonably aggressive global response.
COVID-19 was bad, worse than most people seem to remember. I've got a pandemic-trained MCE expert in my family. Everyone saw it coming when they saw the numbers, and it happened worse than expected. Hospitals overflowing capacity from just critical cases. Tent hospitals being built. They fucking activated the mass-grave contracts to store the bodies. For the first time in nearly a century. Bet you didn't know that. OEMS doesn't publish actions like that because they don't want to cause further panic. It comes through a private email to paramedics (and, fwiw I thought this part silly, sent under a pseudonym that only people in the field would recognize)
For the record (not that I think you actually care about facts, but I'm putting this up there for neutral observers), the deadliness of a pandemic is not primarily driven by its death rate. Only an ignorant person would look to that first. A virus with a 0.1% death rate could end humankind. Many viruses with high death rates have less of an impact. Potentially more important factors are the spread rate (influenced by the incubation rate and contagiousness window), and immunity rates (both inherent immunity and acquired immunity). That COVID-19 was a COVID family of illness (cold family, no known cures, treatments, or immunization paths) made it worse.