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Pretty sure of Ebola went airborne you wouldn’t need to use government force to keep people at home. Covid needed a marketing campaign and a healthy dose of 24

Pretty sure of Ebola went airborne you wouldn’t need to use government force to keep people at home. Covid needed a marketing campaign and a healthy dose of 24/7 media fearmongering to get anybody to “take it serious”. And even then a good chunk of people called BS on it pretty quickly. If there was airborne Ebola and dudes were dropping dead on the streets with blood coming out of every orifice… totally different scenario.

ryandrake 4y ago
At least, in the USA, we have learned nothing from the past two years. I'm pretty sure if Ebola went airborne, and people were dropping dead in the streets, there would still be a large number of people downplaying, denying, and politicizing the virus. And if the government dared to even suggest they voluntarily isolate, they'd be angrily protesting in the street for their innate right to spread it around and die. We're talking about people, who, on their death beds, used their last breath before going on the ventilator to cus out the doctor and call COVID a Liberal hoax. The country is full of belligerent morons with persecution complexes, and there is no reason to expect that they'd change just because Ebola was more visibly disgusting.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I don’t recall a single peep of protest of unfair confinement of Americans in the 2014 Ebola cases in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_Uni... If anything, I recall hearing calls for greater restrictions on the cases and close contacts rather than more lax treatment. That leads me to conclude that people are capable to calibrate their support for restrictions based on some combination of virulence and transmissibility of a disease. Ebola is far more virulent than SARS-CoV2 but less transmissible, so perhaps people have a different level of concern for each of the factors than others would wish. (It sucks that this matters to some in the discussion, but I’m double-vax’d plus boosted and went out of my way to get each of those shots literally within two days of my first moment of eligibility.)
vitaflo 4y ago
If COVID killed 7 year olds at the same rate as 77 year olds the response here would have likely been much different.

ryandrake 4y ago

At least, in the USA, we have learned nothing from the past two years. I'm pretty sure if Ebola went airborne, and people were dropping dead in the streets, there would still be a large number of people downplaying, denying, and politicizing the virus. And if the government dared to even suggest they voluntarily isolate, they'd be angrily protesting in the street for their innate right to spread it around and die. We're talking about people, who, on their death beds, used their last breath before going on the ventilator to cus out the doctor and call COVID a Liberal hoax. The country is full of belligerent morons with persecution complexes, and there is no reason to expect that they'd change just because Ebola was more visibly disgusting.

sokoloff 4y ago
I don’t recall a single peep of protest of unfair confinement of Americans in the 2014 Ebola cases in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_cases_in_the_Uni... If anything, I recall hearing calls for greater restrictions on the cases and close contacts rather than more lax treatment. That leads me to conclude that people are capable to calibrate their support for restrictions based on some combination of virulence and transmissibility of a disease. Ebola is far more virulent than SARS-CoV2 but less transmissible, so perhaps people have a different level of concern for each of the factors than others would wish. (It sucks that this matters to some in the discussion, but I’m double-vax’d plus boosted and went out of my way to get each of those shots literally within two days of my first moment of eligibility.)

vitaflo 4y ago

If COVID killed 7 year olds at the same rate as 77 year olds the response here would have likely been much different.