Speaking of necessary context - in 2019 the US saw several hundred people die of TB, vs ~250,000 of covid so far this year. For better or worse, it's been possi

Speaking of necessary context - in 2019 the US saw several hundred people die of TB, vs ~250,000 of covid so far this year. For better or worse, it's been possible to control the spread of TB so that it is no longer a great threat in the west, and that is what controls the amount of American money and public interest spent on it. But, the way this control has been achieved is that the US and many other rich countries require anyone applying to immigrate (and many people not applying to immigrate, if they are from a risky country) to be screened for TB and be treated successfully before they are allowed to enter the country (with some waivers where treatment is unlikely to be available where they are). On top of all these border controls, at least $100 million is spent specifically on TB just inside the US every year, in order to keep the number of annual cases down somewhere around 10,000. Until 2019 healthcare professionals in the USA were required to be screened for TB every year. People in America who do contract active TB disease are required to take medication daily, personally supervised by a healthcare professional, for six months - to make sure they do it correctly. And all this is only possible because TB takes a pretty significant amount of contact to spread, and there's a detectable latent stage (sometimes lasting an entire lifetime) of infection before it becomes contagious - neither of which is true with covid.