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> The Antonine plague would continue to rage in the cities and military camps of the Roman Empire for at least another decade. A second wave of an undiagnosed e

> The Antonine plague would continue to rage in the cities and military camps of the Roman Empire for at least another decade. A second wave of an undiagnosed epidemic disease hit Rome in 190 AD; if this too was part of the Antonine plague, then the pandemic lasted at least a quarter-century. What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why? Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years. My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.

SoftTalker 2y ago
Pandemics burn out eventually. The weak are killed off, those who survive either have natural immunity or are strong enough to recover. The pathogen itself also evolves; it's not really good for a virus to kill its host, as that limits its ability to spread.
- jajko 2y ago
  This is often mentioned but its true only from statistical or 'strategy' point of view, something viruses on their own simply don't possess. They just multiply via various mechanisms, what happens with their environment is well beyong their capability to care or plan around. Their mutations are random, but its proverbial throwing gazillion bunch of stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. Their numbers and short life span give them maybe 100 million? evolution speed advantage compared to humans. Maybe much more. Think how humans would change in say 100,000 generations.
  - pferde 2y ago
    The virus of course does not do this consciously, but simple darwinian logic dictates that the strains that are too deadly will kill its pool of hosts too quickly, and die off together with them.
    - zarathustreal 2y ago
      The person you’re responding to arguing against a straw man is intellectual Darwinism in play, let nature do its thing
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  I strongly encourage you to use a word other than "weak" in this sort of context. "Susceptible" will do. Ditto for "strong". "Resistant" might suffice. Plenty of people died of COVID19 who were by no measure "weak" (other than susceptibility to COVID19) and your language suggests that viruses act upon some sort of generically less well-adapted genotype. Viruses kill people who are more susceptible to the effects of the virus (which may also differ from person to person). Those people may have previously been judged "strong". "Weak" and "strong" are incredibly poorly chosen words to use in discussing susceptibility to disease.
ggm 2y ago
Immunity builds up over time, and diseases etiolate (become less virulent) because in the end, Ebola isn't a winning strategy for the DNA inside the virus. We don't die of the English Sweating disease, which killed people inside 24h (notably Thomas Cromwell's family, in Hilary Mantel's telling of his life) > they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away" Look, I get why it feels like this, but there is another take on this. The mass immunisation did what it needed to do for us: removed the high risk of mortality and replaced it by background levels of a mostly serious but not fatal disease. The risk is of a new disease, or a new strain. It can be just as bad. If the peridicity of that happening was 10-20 years, you'd have the long tail of the antonine plague, modulated through RNA vaccine development timeframes and the rise and fall of mass public travel. If we just become homebodies and stop flying, Plagues will become local again.
cycomanic 2y ago
> My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moments -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light. You make it sound like it's just a political decision, but a main reason why attention fades because the virus just becomes less deadly. E.g. the Spanish flu killed >20 M people, and yes you're correct it didn't go away, essentially every current flu virus can be traced back to the Spanish flu. People are just not dying from it to the same degree, so naturally we pay less attention.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Its worth noting that its hard to tell whether a virus became more deadly or whether the most at risk died early.
  - tehlike 2y ago
    You can normalize by age groups, that's still possible. And either way, outcome is the same. Virus is not killing as much as it did.
    - lostlogin 2y ago
      > You can normalize by age groups Does that work? If genetically predisposed to dying from something, if it gets most of those predisposed they can’t get it again.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      > Virus is not killing as much as it did. Even that really is impossible to say. Our methods and frequency of testing for CoV-2 infections, both before and after death, have changed dramatically. Previously we were telling everyone to get tested when they feel sick at all, and considering anyone who dies after testing positive to be a Covid death. Now we rarely test and only considering it a Covid death when its as obvious a death from any other cold. We simply can't compare the numbers at all, at best we could say we have drastically reduced how often we mark Covid as the cause of a death. Noe the excess deaths data has absolutely reverted to pre-pandemic levels, but again we were horrible about collecting unbiased data. Excess deaths actually seem to line up better with the vaccine rollout than with the initial viral outbreak. That could be completely coincidental and a sign that the virus was more deadly in its second year, but again we didn't collect the right data and don't know because during the rollout no one was willing to (or allowed to) consider that the vaccines could be killing people, leaving us with a gap in data that would have been really handy to now be able to definitively show that it was a more deadly virus killing people rather than the vaccine itself.
_heimdall 2y ago
There's a really interesting questionvof whether people get tired of past pandemics or over react to new pandemics. Did we get tired of masks and news of how many die from Covid, or did we exaggerate CoV-2 and expect a pandemic with high mortality rate when the data didn't support it?
- hnbad 2y ago
  The thing is, we DID see a high mortality rate. We DID have incinerators running up queues in Italy and mass graves being dug in New York. Those things happened. Millions of people died from COVID, either directly or (more likely) from opportunistic infections enabled by COVID. However the mortality rate normalized as the total number of infections rose. It mostly killed off people in groups that were high risk. That's almost tautological - the people in those groups may not even have known they were high risk prior to COVID though. In other words: if the purpose of the response to COVID was to prevent deaths, we largely failed. If the purpose of the response was to contain CoV-2, we definitely failed. In retrospect, the function if not the purpose of the response was to delay the spread and enable immunization from vaccines. I wouldn't call it a success, especially not globally due to the hesitance to waive patent restrictions for poorer countries, but it was less of a failure than the other two possible purposes of the response. Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with, measuring the impact of COVID on patients who did not die is even more difficult because we not only can't fully know what variables we're looking for but those variables are also likely to be extremely difficult to isolate, especially given the stress of being in a pandemic, news coverage about the pandemic and the measures enacted as a response to the pandemic.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with I don't actually understand why this is considered a meme or rightwing, its always seemed like a reasonable question to me. As you pointed out, a large majority of those who died were already at high risk, meaning they already had underlying health conditions. If someone with high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, etc contracts a novel virus and dies is it really as simple as saying the virus is what killed them? I don't think people often articulate the question well, that's for sure. Its usually used as a talking point, but it is a reasonable question in my opinion. Saying that Covid killed someone that has been dealing with health issues for years or decades, and likely is on multiple prescription medications, writes off all of their underlying conditions and boils it down to a statistic that reads as though the person was totally fine until they contracted CoV-2.
jl6 2y ago
> What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why? It probably killed everyone who wasn’t sufficiently resistant to it, leaving a population who were. Natural selection. The disease probably didn’t go away - it just stopped killing people. This is probably just one of many such events throughout European history that led to a population with various resistances - and when that population arrived on the shores of the Americas, it brought those diseases into contact with a population that enjoyed no such resistances.
- ertian 2y ago
  Also, evolutionary pressure tends to make viruses less deadly. Variants that don't kill or incapacitate the host can spread faster, since the carriers are up and moving around. They'll inoculate the population against more deadly variants in the process. The longer a virus hangs around, the more variants there will be--with the more lethal ones tending to fade away, and the less lethal ones spreading far and wide.
  - b800h 2y ago
    The "Genomic Lineages" graph of Covid variants from the UKHSA gives a good view of how variants follow on from one another, at least with Covid. Flu certainly had three (?) popular variants doing the rounds (one of which was thought to have been eliminated by lockdown) but at the moment, it seems like there's usually one Covid to rule them all at any one time: https://ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk/topics/covid-19 https://ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk/topics/covid-19
  - UncleSlacky 2y ago
    This is true for flu viruses, not covid, as it spreads before symptoms show, so there is no pressure on it to become less deadly, as the fate of the host is immaterial.
    - Kbelicius 2y ago
      Of course there is still pressure on it to become less deadly. If deadly virus starts spreading, no matter when the symptoms show, people will start washing hands, wearing masks and socialize less. All those acts put pressure on virus to become less deadly.
jajko 2y ago
I think we as a mankind went through some collective mental trauma re dealing with covid pandemics, and our subconsiousness ain't best equipped to deal with it. Just like with other trauma it blurred it into into some hazy dreamy distant maybe-land. Fascinating to see it happening in real time and be part of it.
- m_fayer 2y ago
  Amen. All the economic and cultural and political upheaval, not to mention war that’s happened since, we seem to assume that the pandemic stressed a bunch of systems and that’s the causality. I feel like we don’t sufficiently acknowledge that a mass-trauma event also made the entire damn species more irrational and reactive, and that’s going to be our reality for a generation.
piva00 2y ago
> Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years. > My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light. What exactly did you expect though? The pandemic stage has ended, it's now a novel virus that will continue to circulate among us for many, many years until we find a way to eradicate it. Eradicating requires broad vaccination of the population against it over generations, like smallpox, or the way polio is going (many societies have eradicated it). There's not much more to talk about on COVID, for now the strains are not the same killing machines from the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people have been vaccinated while many others refuse to vaccinate themselves. Just like influenza continues to kill (or maim) people year-over-year, COVID will keep killing and maiming people but it's not creating a huge strain in the healthcare system globally. Also, there's not much more to do, the disease exists and will continue existing, we might get new vaccination schemes (like for influenza) to protect the most vulnerable people, we will continue to catch it and probably suffer side-effects but the emergency part of it is mostly over... What were your expectations?
- hnbad 2y ago
  I can only speak for myself and I'm not in the US but having been raised on a diet of "end of history" era Hollywood stories about the world coming together to defeat a common threat, I expected something closer to a war economy than just a bunch of temporary subsidies, conflicting mandates and half-assed lockdowns that ultimatel fizzled out before even the lower bound of vaccination for what the scientists said would be required for herd immunity was met. Instead we saw countries stepping over each other to buy last minute supplies from China because they had eliminated their stockpiles for "efficiency", politicians opportunistically demonstrating defiance in order to make a name for themselves and subsidies being tailored to the specific niche interests of major industries while public services were told to exercise "individual responsibility" instead of receiving additional funds. We clapped for the nurses and then went back to cutting the public health budget because the economy was tanking while a few lucky businesses redistributed societal wealth into their pockets. Nobody demonstrated leadership. Anyone who did was kneecapped by opportunists. Even the EU couldn't commit to a joint plan without having individual member states decide they're special and allowed to do backroom deals to break the same rules they just agreed to. The only thing any politician could agree on was that the economy had to "keep running" at any cost. What did I expect? I don't know, to be honest. But I expected something more coherent and closer to the lies we were told about the state and what it is good for. But what shocked me more is how after the mask came off and revealed that it's all always been false advertising, we simply went back to normal. But this already happened before, e.g. after the Wikileaks and Snowden revelations. I shouldn't be surprised that people prefer to forget.
goodcanadian 2y ago
Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic . . . I debated responding as there are other responses that get it mostly right . . . You are correct that the virus is still around and will probably be forever more. But, it ceased being a public health issue 2-2.5 years ago. What happened? Everybody has either been vaccinated or had the virus or most likely, both. So the virus continues to exist and continues to evolve and people continue to get sick, but everyone's immune system has now seen something closely related and is much more able to fight the disease off. It has endemised and become basically like any other cold or flu that exists. There were already 3(?) coronavirus strains widely circulating in the human population before Covid-19 became a thing. Covid-19 has simply become one of ~200 different viruses that cause the common cold.
- somewhereoutth 2y ago
  Covid-19 hasn't become - it is still much the same and not the same as the common cold. But as you point out we have become more tolerant of it (or at least are now able to convince ourselves that we are more tolerant to it).
cm2187 2y ago
That's because the current variants are fairly mild. The original variant was brutal for the population at risk and we saw a jump in excess mortality. I believe mortality has since come back down. The anomaly was that the media were still making a big deal out of covid when vaccines were available and the variants were mild. Of course until the Ukrainian war started which magically "stopped covid". It will take time before passion and fear cool down and people look objectively at our reaction to covid. I think it will appear as a gigantic overreaction compared to similar outbreaks like the 1958 flu.
miroljub 2y ago
We all know that wars end pandemics. As soon as the hot phase of the war in the Ukraine restarted, Covid was "gone". Maybe something similar was the case in the Roman times too.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  ??? The Spanish Flu became as bad as it was because of a hot war - one of the hottest actually: WWI[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Timeline
  - mharig 2y ago
    Maybe. Maybe not. Search for the death rates in e.g. Switzerland and Germany.
wyldfire 2y ago
> we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The most vulnerable population succumbed to it and died. Everyone who could be infected was infected. This pandemic became endemic, like some but not all other pandemics. Once it's endemic, the policy interventions that were apparently controversial are less effective. Survivors become more immune than they were before. "By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain."
- throw0101d 2y ago
  > "By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain." For anyone wonder, H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10445439-for-so-it-had-come-about-as-indeed-i-and https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10445439-for-so-it-had-come... * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/621562-by-the-toll-of-a-billion-deaths-man-has-bought https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/621562-by-the-toll-of-a-bil...
- catlikesshrimp 2y ago
  This applies to diseases which are importantly but not always mortal. And very contagious. Like coronavirus Very contagious diseases which are rarely mortal never go away. Like chicken pox Not very contagious diseases which are always mortal don't spread far away. Like ebola and maybe the original pest. They require a reservoir lest they vanish forever. Very contagious and always mortal diseases are self limited, they kill whole populations. One of the downsides of a global community is that almost the whole humanity is one population. Self sufficient populations are found in the north pole. And in some island east of India called "Sentry island". I hope there are more
- AmericanChopper 2y ago
  > The most vulnerable population succumbed to it and died. Everyone who could be infected was infected. This explanation has some extremely obvious flaws. The world is still full of people who meet all the criteria of being particularly vulnerable to coronavirus. I doubt I’d be able to leave my house without seeing somebody who’s extremely obese or old.
sidewndr46 2y ago
Given that we're talking about a plague from over a thousand years ago, once it spread to the populations that people were in frequent contact with it basically halts at that point. Everyone has gotten sick and either died or acquired limited immunity. If there is no trade route to spread it, it can't go anywhere on its own. Also I think we can be reasonably sure that if far away merchant arrives at an area where the bodies are literally piling up out side the gates, they won't enter. It is a 19th and 20th century innovation that viruses can spread so easily.
- nottorp 2y ago
  However, I'm under the impression that the Roman Empire was a lot more linked than we think when we say "they didn't have cars or airplanes". Sea/river transport has been available since the first monkey climbed on a floating log and it was already widespread, cheap and convenient even 2k years ago.
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    Human population was only a tiny fraction of 20th century numbers back then. There were no casual travelers from Constantinpole to Buenos Aires at all.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Not that far, but you could probably carry a virus from Tomis [1] to Gades [2] via several merchant ships. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constan%C8%9Ba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constan%C8%9Ba [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A1diz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A1diz
AlecSchueler 2y ago
I think when people talk about COVID-19 in the past tense they're referring to the period of national lockdowns, which are no longer necessary since the health services are not being overwhelmed in the way before anyone had immunity/vaccinations. I don't think anyone believes the virus was eradicated.
DiggyJohnson 2y ago
We can't get rid of COVID-19, it's not just a decision or apathy.
- lamontcg 2y ago
  Yeah it has jumped to too many other species to ever have a chance in hell of eradication. Literal fantasyland to think that it going away is a viable option at our technological level.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
What exactly do you propose we do about covid anyway? None of the mitigations that were forced upon us did anything beyond make things much worse. Seriously. Covid wasn’t even that bad relative to other pandemics in the past. Besides I think the real reason nobody really talks about it anymore is because a lot of people woke up to how badly they got scammed and are pretty embarrassed with their reaction. No to mention flushing several years of their life and their children’s life down the toilet for nothing. Not to mention the disastrous economic fallout we will be suffering through for quite some time. … which again, was all for absolutely nothing.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  > None of the mitigations that were forced upon us did anything beyond make things much worse. > Covid wasn’t even that bad relative to other pandemics in the past. Do you not see how these two statements contradict each other? What did you expect to see if the mitigations had worked?
rednerrus 2y ago
There were 141 deaths attributed to COVID last week. It was 838 in 2023, 1,678 in 2022, 3,694 in 2021, and 11,243 in 2020. This is practically gone away. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
- thenerdhead 2y ago
  I believe data is now going to be more limited: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/09/fact-sheet-end-of-the-covid-19-public-health-emergency.html https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/09/fact-sheet-end-of-... > CDC COVID-19 data surveillance has been a cornerstone of our response, and during the PHE, HHS had the authority to require lab test reporting for COVID-19. At the end of the COVID-19 PHE, HHS will no longer have this express authority to require this data from labs, which will affect the reporting of negative test results and impact the ability to calculate percent positivity for COVID-19 tests in some jurisdictions. Hospital data reporting will continue as required by the CMS conditions of participation through April 30, 2024, but reporting will be reduced from the current daily reporting to weekly.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  You might choose to provide a geographic area with such numbers. I have no idea what you're referring to ...
- btbuildem 2y ago
  > This is practically gone away You mean the collection and reporting of data, right? That's what's gone away? What would've made the virus itself go away?
Aardwolf 2y ago
That seems unfair to say, covid-19 is causing way less deaths now than then, and the population is more resistant to it now
spuzz 2y ago
>Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic That is very clearly the intent of the article and a fantastic reason to write it off as social media garage and stop reading it.
rsynnott 2y ago
For covid in particular (and also the Spanish Flu, to a large extent), number of deaths is the big factor; deaths are _dramatically_ down in most countries. Barring a perfect vaccine, it's likely never going away entirely, but it's also generally not threatening to collapse healthcare systems anymore.

SoftTalker 2y ago

Pandemics burn out eventually. The weak are killed off, those who survive either have natural immunity or are strong enough to recover. The pathogen itself also evolves; it's not really good for a virus to kill its host, as that limits its ability to spread.

jajko 2y ago
This is often mentioned but its true only from statistical or 'strategy' point of view, something viruses on their own simply don't possess. They just multiply via various mechanisms, what happens with their environment is well beyong their capability to care or plan around. Their mutations are random, but its proverbial throwing gazillion bunch of stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. Their numbers and short life span give them maybe 100 million? evolution speed advantage compared to humans. Maybe much more. Think how humans would change in say 100,000 generations.
- pferde 2y ago
  The virus of course does not do this consciously, but simple darwinian logic dictates that the strains that are too deadly will kill its pool of hosts too quickly, and die off together with them.
  - zarathustreal 2y ago
    The person you’re responding to arguing against a straw man is intellectual Darwinism in play, let nature do its thing
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
I strongly encourage you to use a word other than "weak" in this sort of context. "Susceptible" will do. Ditto for "strong". "Resistant" might suffice. Plenty of people died of COVID19 who were by no measure "weak" (other than susceptibility to COVID19) and your language suggests that viruses act upon some sort of generically less well-adapted genotype. Viruses kill people who are more susceptible to the effects of the virus (which may also differ from person to person). Those people may have previously been judged "strong". "Weak" and "strong" are incredibly poorly chosen words to use in discussing susceptibility to disease.

ggm 2y ago

Immunity builds up over time, and diseases etiolate (become less virulent) because in the end, Ebola isn't a winning strategy for the DNA inside the virus. We don't die of the English Sweating disease, which killed people inside 24h (notably Thomas Cromwell's family, in Hilary Mantel's telling of his life) > they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away" Look, I get why it feels like this, but there is another take on this. The mass immunisation did what it needed to do for us: removed the high risk of mortality and replaced it by background levels of a mostly serious but not fatal disease. The risk is of a new disease, or a new strain. It can be just as bad. If the peridicity of that happening was 10-20 years, you'd have the long tail of the antonine plague, modulated through RNA vaccine development timeframes and the rise and fall of mass public travel. If we just become homebodies and stop flying, Plagues will become local again.

cycomanic 2y ago

> My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moments -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light. You make it sound like it's just a political decision, but a main reason why attention fades because the virus just becomes less deadly. E.g. the Spanish flu killed >20 M people, and yes you're correct it didn't go away, essentially every current flu virus can be traced back to the Spanish flu. People are just not dying from it to the same degree, so naturally we pay less attention.

_heimdall 2y ago
Its worth noting that its hard to tell whether a virus became more deadly or whether the most at risk died early.
- tehlike 2y ago
  You can normalize by age groups, that's still possible. And either way, outcome is the same. Virus is not killing as much as it did.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    > You can normalize by age groups Does that work? If genetically predisposed to dying from something, if it gets most of those predisposed they can’t get it again.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > Virus is not killing as much as it did. Even that really is impossible to say. Our methods and frequency of testing for CoV-2 infections, both before and after death, have changed dramatically. Previously we were telling everyone to get tested when they feel sick at all, and considering anyone who dies after testing positive to be a Covid death. Now we rarely test and only considering it a Covid death when its as obvious a death from any other cold. We simply can't compare the numbers at all, at best we could say we have drastically reduced how often we mark Covid as the cause of a death. Noe the excess deaths data has absolutely reverted to pre-pandemic levels, but again we were horrible about collecting unbiased data. Excess deaths actually seem to line up better with the vaccine rollout than with the initial viral outbreak. That could be completely coincidental and a sign that the virus was more deadly in its second year, but again we didn't collect the right data and don't know because during the rollout no one was willing to (or allowed to) consider that the vaccines could be killing people, leaving us with a gap in data that would have been really handy to now be able to definitively show that it was a more deadly virus killing people rather than the vaccine itself.

_heimdall 2y ago

There's a really interesting questionvof whether people get tired of past pandemics or over react to new pandemics. Did we get tired of masks and news of how many die from Covid, or did we exaggerate CoV-2 and expect a pandemic with high mortality rate when the data didn't support it?

hnbad 2y ago
The thing is, we DID see a high mortality rate. We DID have incinerators running up queues in Italy and mass graves being dug in New York. Those things happened. Millions of people died from COVID, either directly or (more likely) from opportunistic infections enabled by COVID. However the mortality rate normalized as the total number of infections rose. It mostly killed off people in groups that were high risk. That's almost tautological - the people in those groups may not even have known they were high risk prior to COVID though. In other words: if the purpose of the response to COVID was to prevent deaths, we largely failed. If the purpose of the response was to contain CoV-2, we definitely failed. In retrospect, the function if not the purpose of the response was to delay the spread and enable immunization from vaccines. I wouldn't call it a success, especially not globally due to the hesitance to waive patent restrictions for poorer countries, but it was less of a failure than the other two possible purposes of the response. Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with, measuring the impact of COVID on patients who did not die is even more difficult because we not only can't fully know what variables we're looking for but those variables are also likely to be extremely difficult to isolate, especially given the stress of being in a pandemic, news coverage about the pandemic and the measures enacted as a response to the pandemic.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with I don't actually understand why this is considered a meme or rightwing, its always seemed like a reasonable question to me. As you pointed out, a large majority of those who died were already at high risk, meaning they already had underlying health conditions. If someone with high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, etc contracts a novel virus and dies is it really as simple as saying the virus is what killed them? I don't think people often articulate the question well, that's for sure. Its usually used as a talking point, but it is a reasonable question in my opinion. Saying that Covid killed someone that has been dealing with health issues for years or decades, and likely is on multiple prescription medications, writes off all of their underlying conditions and boils it down to a statistic that reads as though the person was totally fine until they contracted CoV-2.

jl6 2y ago

> What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why? It probably killed everyone who wasn’t sufficiently resistant to it, leaving a population who were. Natural selection. The disease probably didn’t go away - it just stopped killing people. This is probably just one of many such events throughout European history that led to a population with various resistances - and when that population arrived on the shores of the Americas, it brought those diseases into contact with a population that enjoyed no such resistances.

ertian 2y ago
Also, evolutionary pressure tends to make viruses less deadly. Variants that don't kill or incapacitate the host can spread faster, since the carriers are up and moving around. They'll inoculate the population against more deadly variants in the process. The longer a virus hangs around, the more variants there will be--with the more lethal ones tending to fade away, and the less lethal ones spreading far and wide.
- b800h 2y ago
  The "Genomic Lineages" graph of Covid variants from the UKHSA gives a good view of how variants follow on from one another, at least with Covid. Flu certainly had three (?) popular variants doing the rounds (one of which was thought to have been eliminated by lockdown) but at the moment, it seems like there's usually one Covid to rule them all at any one time: https://ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk/topics/covid-19 https://ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk/topics/covid-19
- UncleSlacky 2y ago
  This is true for flu viruses, not covid, as it spreads before symptoms show, so there is no pressure on it to become less deadly, as the fate of the host is immaterial.
  - Kbelicius 2y ago
    Of course there is still pressure on it to become less deadly. If deadly virus starts spreading, no matter when the symptoms show, people will start washing hands, wearing masks and socialize less. All those acts put pressure on virus to become less deadly.

jajko 2y ago

I think we as a mankind went through some collective mental trauma re dealing with covid pandemics, and our subconsiousness ain't best equipped to deal with it. Just like with other trauma it blurred it into into some hazy dreamy distant maybe-land. Fascinating to see it happening in real time and be part of it.

m_fayer 2y ago
Amen. All the economic and cultural and political upheaval, not to mention war that’s happened since, we seem to assume that the pandemic stressed a bunch of systems and that’s the causality. I feel like we don’t sufficiently acknowledge that a mass-trauma event also made the entire damn species more irrational and reactive, and that’s going to be our reality for a generation.

piva00 2y ago

> Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years. > My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light. What exactly did you expect though? The pandemic stage has ended, it's now a novel virus that will continue to circulate among us for many, many years until we find a way to eradicate it. Eradicating requires broad vaccination of the population against it over generations, like smallpox, or the way polio is going (many societies have eradicated it). There's not much more to talk about on COVID, for now the strains are not the same killing machines from the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people have been vaccinated while many others refuse to vaccinate themselves. Just like influenza continues to kill (or maim) people year-over-year, COVID will keep killing and maiming people but it's not creating a huge strain in the healthcare system globally. Also, there's not much more to do, the disease exists and will continue existing, we might get new vaccination schemes (like for influenza) to protect the most vulnerable people, we will continue to catch it and probably suffer side-effects but the emergency part of it is mostly over... What were your expectations?

hnbad 2y ago
I can only speak for myself and I'm not in the US but having been raised on a diet of "end of history" era Hollywood stories about the world coming together to defeat a common threat, I expected something closer to a war economy than just a bunch of temporary subsidies, conflicting mandates and half-assed lockdowns that ultimatel fizzled out before even the lower bound of vaccination for what the scientists said would be required for herd immunity was met. Instead we saw countries stepping over each other to buy last minute supplies from China because they had eliminated their stockpiles for "efficiency", politicians opportunistically demonstrating defiance in order to make a name for themselves and subsidies being tailored to the specific niche interests of major industries while public services were told to exercise "individual responsibility" instead of receiving additional funds. We clapped for the nurses and then went back to cutting the public health budget because the economy was tanking while a few lucky businesses redistributed societal wealth into their pockets. Nobody demonstrated leadership. Anyone who did was kneecapped by opportunists. Even the EU couldn't commit to a joint plan without having individual member states decide they're special and allowed to do backroom deals to break the same rules they just agreed to. The only thing any politician could agree on was that the economy had to "keep running" at any cost. What did I expect? I don't know, to be honest. But I expected something more coherent and closer to the lies we were told about the state and what it is good for. But what shocked me more is how after the mask came off and revealed that it's all always been false advertising, we simply went back to normal. But this already happened before, e.g. after the Wikileaks and Snowden revelations. I shouldn't be surprised that people prefer to forget.

goodcanadian 2y ago

Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic . . . I debated responding as there are other responses that get it mostly right . . . You are correct that the virus is still around and will probably be forever more. But, it ceased being a public health issue 2-2.5 years ago. What happened? Everybody has either been vaccinated or had the virus or most likely, both. So the virus continues to exist and continues to evolve and people continue to get sick, but everyone's immune system has now seen something closely related and is much more able to fight the disease off. It has endemised and become basically like any other cold or flu that exists. There were already 3(?) coronavirus strains widely circulating in the human population before Covid-19 became a thing. Covid-19 has simply become one of ~200 different viruses that cause the common cold.

somewhereoutth 2y ago
Covid-19 hasn't become - it is still much the same and not the same as the common cold. But as you point out we have become more tolerant of it (or at least are now able to convince ourselves that we are more tolerant to it).

cm2187 2y ago

That's because the current variants are fairly mild. The original variant was brutal for the population at risk and we saw a jump in excess mortality. I believe mortality has since come back down. The anomaly was that the media were still making a big deal out of covid when vaccines were available and the variants were mild. Of course until the Ukrainian war started which magically "stopped covid". It will take time before passion and fear cool down and people look objectively at our reaction to covid. I think it will appear as a gigantic overreaction compared to similar outbreaks like the 1958 flu.

miroljub 2y ago

We all know that wars end pandemics. As soon as the hot phase of the war in the Ukraine restarted, Covid was "gone". Maybe something similar was the case in the Roman times too.

AlexandrB 2y ago
??? The Spanish Flu became as bad as it was because of a hot war - one of the hottest actually: WWI[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Timeline
- mharig 2y ago
  Maybe. Maybe not. Search for the death rates in e.g. Switzerland and Germany.

wyldfire 2y ago

> we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The most vulnerable population succumbed to it and died. Everyone who could be infected was infected. This pandemic became endemic, like some but not all other pandemics. Once it's endemic, the policy interventions that were apparently controversial are less effective. Survivors become more immune than they were before. "By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain."

throw0101d 2y ago
> "By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain." For anyone wonder, H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10445439-for-so-it-had-come-about-as-indeed-i-and https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10445439-for-so-it-had-come... * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/621562-by-the-toll-of-a-billion-deaths-man-has-bought https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/621562-by-the-toll-of-a-bil...
catlikesshrimp 2y ago
This applies to diseases which are importantly but not always mortal. And very contagious. Like coronavirus Very contagious diseases which are rarely mortal never go away. Like chicken pox Not very contagious diseases which are always mortal don't spread far away. Like ebola and maybe the original pest. They require a reservoir lest they vanish forever. Very contagious and always mortal diseases are self limited, they kill whole populations. One of the downsides of a global community is that almost the whole humanity is one population. Self sufficient populations are found in the north pole. And in some island east of India called "Sentry island". I hope there are more
AmericanChopper 2y ago
> The most vulnerable population succumbed to it and died. Everyone who could be infected was infected. This explanation has some extremely obvious flaws. The world is still full of people who meet all the criteria of being particularly vulnerable to coronavirus. I doubt I’d be able to leave my house without seeing somebody who’s extremely obese or old.

sidewndr46 2y ago

Given that we're talking about a plague from over a thousand years ago, once it spread to the populations that people were in frequent contact with it basically halts at that point. Everyone has gotten sick and either died or acquired limited immunity. If there is no trade route to spread it, it can't go anywhere on its own. Also I think we can be reasonably sure that if far away merchant arrives at an area where the bodies are literally piling up out side the gates, they won't enter. It is a 19th and 20th century innovation that viruses can spread so easily.

nottorp 2y ago
However, I'm under the impression that the Roman Empire was a lot more linked than we think when we say "they didn't have cars or airplanes". Sea/river transport has been available since the first monkey climbed on a floating log and it was already widespread, cheap and convenient even 2k years ago.
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  Human population was only a tiny fraction of 20th century numbers back then. There were no casual travelers from Constantinpole to Buenos Aires at all.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Not that far, but you could probably carry a virus from Tomis [1] to Gades [2] via several merchant ships. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constan%C8%9Ba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constan%C8%9Ba [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A1diz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A1diz

AlecSchueler 2y ago

I think when people talk about COVID-19 in the past tense they're referring to the period of national lockdowns, which are no longer necessary since the health services are not being overwhelmed in the way before anyone had immunity/vaccinations. I don't think anyone believes the virus was eradicated.

DiggyJohnson 2y ago

We can't get rid of COVID-19, it's not just a decision or apathy.

lamontcg 2y ago
Yeah it has jumped to too many other species to ever have a chance in hell of eradication. Literal fantasyland to think that it going away is a viable option at our technological level.

cruffle_duffle 2y ago

What exactly do you propose we do about covid anyway? None of the mitigations that were forced upon us did anything beyond make things much worse. Seriously. Covid wasn’t even that bad relative to other pandemics in the past. Besides I think the real reason nobody really talks about it anymore is because a lot of people woke up to how badly they got scammed and are pretty embarrassed with their reaction. No to mention flushing several years of their life and their children’s life down the toilet for nothing. Not to mention the disastrous economic fallout we will be suffering through for quite some time. … which again, was all for absolutely nothing.

AlexandrB 2y ago
> None of the mitigations that were forced upon us did anything beyond make things much worse. > Covid wasn’t even that bad relative to other pandemics in the past. Do you not see how these two statements contradict each other? What did you expect to see if the mitigations had worked?

rednerrus 2y ago

There were 141 deaths attributed to COVID last week. It was 838 in 2023, 1,678 in 2022, 3,694 in 2021, and 11,243 in 2020. This is practically gone away. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

thenerdhead 2y ago
I believe data is now going to be more limited: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/09/fact-sheet-end-of-the-covid-19-public-health-emergency.html https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/09/fact-sheet-end-of-... > CDC COVID-19 data surveillance has been a cornerstone of our response, and during the PHE, HHS had the authority to require lab test reporting for COVID-19. At the end of the COVID-19 PHE, HHS will no longer have this express authority to require this data from labs, which will affect the reporting of negative test results and impact the ability to calculate percent positivity for COVID-19 tests in some jurisdictions. Hospital data reporting will continue as required by the CMS conditions of participation through April 30, 2024, but reporting will be reduced from the current daily reporting to weekly.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
You might choose to provide a geographic area with such numbers. I have no idea what you're referring to ...
btbuildem 2y ago
> This is practically gone away You mean the collection and reporting of data, right? That's what's gone away? What would've made the virus itself go away?

Aardwolf 2y ago

That seems unfair to say, covid-19 is causing way less deaths now than then, and the population is more resistant to it now

spuzz 2y ago

>Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic That is very clearly the intent of the article and a fantastic reason to write it off as social media garage and stop reading it.

rsynnott 2y ago

For covid in particular (and also the Spanish Flu, to a large extent), number of deaths is the big factor; deaths are _dramatically_ down in most countries. Barring a perfect vaccine, it's likely never going away entirely, but it's also generally not threatening to collapse healthcare systems anymore.