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Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people di

Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the space of a hundred years. Civilization can survive an awful lot of people dying and even if COVID had a 2% fatality rate it would roll on more or less without a blip. The Spanish flu didn't lead to the fall of civilization anywhere and it killed a lot more people in the prime of their life. COVID deaths are highly concrentrated in the over 50s. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu

zapataband1 5y ago
If a virus infects more people it has more of a chance of spreading and more of a chance of mutating into a deadlier virus that affects a different demographic. Bringing sweden up but not the vast number of countries or active measure still currently in place, including mass vaccinations, seems to serve a narrow narritive. Bringing up civilizations and cultures that did in-fact get destroyed by viruses doesn't really help your argument.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  The Inca didn't even have the concept of infectious disease, or quarantine. If you want a 99.9th percentile bad outcome look at Black Death Norway. Civilization didn't collapse in the face of 60% of the population dying. These are people without the germ theory of disease, never mind antibiotics, antivirals and the state capacity to seal borders completely and modern hospitals. COVID can be really, really bad without it ever having been likely to be a civilizational or species level threat.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    In medieval Norway most individual settlements were almost totally self-reliant. Some could go for years without any interaction with outsiders and such interaction as they had was mostly about things not essential to survival. (Probably the same is true for the Incan empire.) Things are different now, yes.
oblio 5y ago
The Incas had a very limited set of Old Worlders coming over, though. Not hundreds of flights per day. Plus it depends on what you mean by civilization. What the Incas built was sophisticated but child's play compared to a modern civilization. A SARS 1 global pandemic would have probably set back the entire world 50 years or more. Cities would have been abandoned, supply chains destroyed, most likely major wars started due to shortages.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > Diseases > Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried partial, and often total, immunity to most of these infections with the notable exception of influenza. Falciparum malaria, by far the most severe variant of that plasmodial infection, and yellow fever also crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas.
  - oblio 5y ago
    You didn't address my direct point (speed of propagation) plus guess what, those wiped out several civilizations in the New World, directly contradicting your entire subthread.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      We're vastly richer than the Inca or Aztecs, the most technologically advanced New World civilizations and we know about quarantine and infectious disease, which they didn't. The Inca almost survived getting multiple diseases ten or more times deadlier than COVID at the same time, while being assaulted by people with vastly superior weaponry. It's possible for diseases bad enough to end human civilization to emerge but COVID was never going to be it.
      - 5y ago
rob_c 5y ago
You make strong arguments, but unfortunately covid didn't happen in a political vacuum and western responses became tied up in anti-trump and anti-brexit rhetoric both sides of the pond. But I do wish people a) understood stats and b) listened to reason not rhetoric.
csomar 5y ago
So you are saying a pandemic could potentially collapse a civilization, but the flu was not serious enough to do that? The Inca should be a cautionary tale. The human race is unlikely to go away unless we have a dinosaurs-like extinction event. However, civilizations are much more delicate.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > However, civilizations are much more delicate. But they're really not. Civilization in Norway survived the Black Death killing 60% of the population. We could regress a great deal in terms of the technology we could apply with large enough fatality rates but if we can still feed large numbers of people and maintain things at all we can keep civilization going. If one third of the US population dropped dead it would have the same population as in the late 1960s. They kept civilization going. Things would get a lot worse for a long time but there'd be no danger of civilizational collapse.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    That assume the people remaining actually choose to retain civilization. That seems like an easy choice, but it should by now be clear it is not necessarily a majority choice.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > We could regress a great deal in terms of the technology we could apply with large enough fatality rates but if we can still feed large numbers of people and maintain things at all we can keep civilization going. Take away enough technology and you'll still have people, but not so much civilization. In a way, technology is civilization.
CRConrad 5y ago
> Sweden exists. They never locked down. And about five times as many Swedes have died from Covid compared to their Nordic neighbours.

zapataband1 5y ago

If a virus infects more people it has more of a chance of spreading and more of a chance of mutating into a deadlier virus that affects a different demographic. Bringing sweden up but not the vast number of countries or active measure still currently in place, including mass vaccinations, seems to serve a narrow narritive. Bringing up civilizations and cultures that did in-fact get destroyed by viruses doesn't really help your argument.

barry-cotter 5y ago
The Inca didn't even have the concept of infectious disease, or quarantine. If you want a 99.9th percentile bad outcome look at Black Death Norway. Civilization didn't collapse in the face of 60% of the population dying. These are people without the germ theory of disease, never mind antibiotics, antivirals and the state capacity to seal borders completely and modern hospitals. COVID can be really, really bad without it ever having been likely to be a civilizational or species level threat.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  In medieval Norway most individual settlements were almost totally self-reliant. Some could go for years without any interaction with outsiders and such interaction as they had was mostly about things not essential to survival. (Probably the same is true for the Incan empire.) Things are different now, yes.

oblio 5y ago

The Incas had a very limited set of Old Worlders coming over, though. Not hundreds of flights per day. Plus it depends on what you mean by civilization. What the Incas built was sophisticated but child's play compared to a modern civilization. A SARS 1 global pandemic would have probably set back the entire world 50 years or more. Cities would have been abandoned, supply chains destroyed, most likely major wars started due to shortages.

barry-cotter 5y ago
> Diseases > Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried partial, and often total, immunity to most of these infections with the notable exception of influenza. Falciparum malaria, by far the most severe variant of that plasmodial infection, and yellow fever also crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas.
- oblio 5y ago
  You didn't address my direct point (speed of propagation) plus guess what, those wiped out several civilizations in the New World, directly contradicting your entire subthread.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    We're vastly richer than the Inca or Aztecs, the most technologically advanced New World civilizations and we know about quarantine and infectious disease, which they didn't. The Inca almost survived getting multiple diseases ten or more times deadlier than COVID at the same time, while being assaulted by people with vastly superior weaponry. It's possible for diseases bad enough to end human civilization to emerge but COVID was never going to be it.
    - 5y ago

rob_c 5y ago

You make strong arguments, but unfortunately covid didn't happen in a political vacuum and western responses became tied up in anti-trump and anti-brexit rhetoric both sides of the pond. But I do wish people a) understood stats and b) listened to reason not rhetoric.

csomar 5y ago

So you are saying a pandemic could potentially collapse a civilization, but the flu was not serious enough to do that? The Inca should be a cautionary tale. The human race is unlikely to go away unless we have a dinosaurs-like extinction event. However, civilizations are much more delicate.

barry-cotter 5y ago
> However, civilizations are much more delicate. But they're really not. Civilization in Norway survived the Black Death killing 60% of the population. We could regress a great deal in terms of the technology we could apply with large enough fatality rates but if we can still feed large numbers of people and maintain things at all we can keep civilization going. If one third of the US population dropped dead it would have the same population as in the late 1960s. They kept civilization going. Things would get a lot worse for a long time but there'd be no danger of civilizational collapse.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  That assume the people remaining actually choose to retain civilization. That seems like an easy choice, but it should by now be clear it is not necessarily a majority choice.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > We could regress a great deal in terms of the technology we could apply with large enough fatality rates but if we can still feed large numbers of people and maintain things at all we can keep civilization going. Take away enough technology and you'll still have people, but not so much civilization. In a way, technology is civilization.

CRConrad 5y ago

> Sweden exists. They never locked down. And about five times as many Swedes have died from Covid compared to their Nordic neighbours.