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While the COVID-19 pandemic has struck hard in some countries, it has not been on a scale which threatens humanity in any form? Excess deaths for 2020 are in th

While the COVID-19 pandemic has struck hard in some countries, it has not been on a scale which threatens humanity in any form? Excess deaths for 2020 are in the ranges 10-300 per 100k, meaning under 0.3% in the worst case. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... Not that pandemics cannot be properly devastating. During the bubonic plague up to 50% of the population died in many areas across the world. It was still no threat to humanity though.

sgt101 6y ago
A pathogen as deadly as the plague and as mysterious or intractable to medicine as the plague was in the 1200's released into a connected world such as ours would have an astonishing impact.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
The threshold that matters isn't extincting humanity, but collapsing modern technological civilization. That's much easier to do. The current pandemic revealed how fragile our supply chains are, and I still consider it a small miracle that the impact so far was so small. Lots of people are in dire straits, yes, but the world structurally didn't change much.