4 ms·

I think it's extremely unlikely that rates of illness have gone up.

• jwuphysics 4y ago
  As someone who is unaware of any relevant literature on the subject, I'd love to hone my intuitions a bit. Could you say more about your line of reasoning?
  • mrtesthah 4y ago
    Well, because we have things like clean water and sanitary preparation of food, we can avoid things like typhoid fever, cholera, ecoli, and all manner of parasites.
    • qbasic_forever 4y ago
      We also have jets and international air travel that can take a patient zero anywhere in the world and around any people in a matter of hours (well before they're too sick to know not to be traveling). With the Spanish flu in 1918 it took months for it to get around, mostly through rail and steam ships. With COVID-19 we saw some variants explode around the entire globe in a matter of _weeks_.
• seszett 4y ago
  I think at least the profile of illnesses must have changed. I spent a year on a rather isolated base on an island, with about 50 other people. Hygiene was certainly not as good as it is here in the civilised world as we often didn't have running water, ate wild meat that had simply been stored in the cold outside for days, food products with an expiration date a few years in the past, etc, and we just didn't get sick. We got sick when the supply ship came, though. It wasn't Antarctica either, the conditions are mostly similar to Northern Europe, not so different from Brittany. I think the situation is quite similar to how humans lived for a long time, in small groups with only occasional contact with strangers, and in these conditions I'm sure infectious disease was much less common than it is now. Of course disease did exist, but I think it would mostly have been diseases brought by insects or other vectors, not as much things like the flu or the common cold.