Perhaps I’m a bit too relative in thinking our threshold for responding to pandemics should be in proportion to the response than previously seen pandemics and

Perhaps I’m a bit too relative in thinking our threshold for responding to pandemics should be in proportion to the response than previously seen pandemics and events... so here’s what I mean: “Any mortality comparisons between these two pandemics in the United States, 2020 and 1918, must differentiate between totals and rates. The current US population, a little more than 330 million, is more than three times larger than the population in 1918, estimated at 105 million. The 675,000 deaths attributed to the influenza epidemic made up 0.64 percent of the total population, a little more than six in every thousand people. By contrast, the more than 500,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 make up about 0.15 percent of the total population, or between one and two in every thousand people. If COVID-19 caused deaths at the same rate as the 1918 epidemic, the total would approach two million. Even the disturbing projections of more than to 600,000 deaths by July 1, 2021, would still remain below the rates recorded in the earlier epidemic.“ https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hblog20210329.51293 https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hblog20210329.5129... So, by one token, you could say we did better through the response of drastic measures... Or we could note that the world didn’t perform wide scale testing in the 1918-1919 pandemic to determine how many other seemingly unrelated deaths also contained Spanish Flu, or how many pandemic cases they really had back then. So without knowing how many contracted both sets of viruses, it’s tough to make a call on the R0, but could a rough approximation of a pandemic's severity could be the proportion of populations, strata by types (age, whatever you’d like), that experienced fatalities? If so, does that mean the flu then was worse? What was the world response at that time? I’ll bore you less and say that the measures taken then were no where near as strict as those now. So comparing that response to this new worlds response... why does there appear to be a disproportionate response that appears more strict in this age than the last? Many possible answers can fit the set of facts above... one extremely unlikely answer I’ve entertained is that the Covid-19 infection is latent in nature and could cause issues down the line. Prions share in that characteristic in some research... as in they have a latent emergence that some have been thought to be misdiagnosed as dementia or the like, when in fact it is probably mad cow disease. So those super, super loose correlations I look at and say, “hmm if someone tells me Covid causes a latent prion disease with solid facts, I wouldn’t be surprised” — I’m mot advocating that is what’s happening, I’m just saying ruling it out as completely invalid without evidence is a little short sighted.