And yet the 1918 flu had profound effects, and there is no guarantee that any future pandemic wouldn’t have a much higher CFR and total mortality. We also have

And yet the 1918 flu had profound effects, and there is no guarantee that any future pandemic wouldn’t have a much higher CFR and total mortality. We also have to consider the impact of societal collapse in the near term, and the deaths that would cause. It’s true that the Black Death was spectacularly deveststing, but it’s also true that in a world where regular shipments of food and medicine are critical to daily survival, the diseases themselves would probably be secondary to starvation and societal collapse. Very very few people in the developed world could support themselves without the context of a functioning state for very long. It’s also true that we’re armed to the teeth and have lots of transportation. People would fight for food, fight for medicine they were used to a steady supply of, and you’d have mass casualties from thst alone. In the true (hopefully deeply unlikely) worst cast you’d see the use of nuclear weapons. The deaths in Asia from the plague had very little impact on Europeans, and visa versa. We can’t honestly say the same today. If something like MERS mutates in the right way, we could very easily look at a similar CFR to the Black Death, in a world with more than 7 billion people in it.