Originally Posted by
Bahamasflyer
But none of those outbreaks (except 1918) practically shut down our entire country for weeks on end and cost $10-15 trillion, while costing 200K lives. Sure, they were serious....of course, but not even on the same order of magnitude as COVID.
But not a single nation anywhere in the world was prepared, not just us. Maybeeeee Taiwan, S Korea, or Japan, but other than that......not a single one.
In 1957, US population was half its present and that flu outbreak killed 110,000 before a quickly fielded vaccine stopped it. It was every bit as scary as today’s, but without the panic attack this one has been. No social media, no unreasonable expectation that life was safe.