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...this was back when we didn't fly around the planet giving a virus the possibility of spreading to the entire globe within a few days... We have more people,
by gojomo 14y ago
...this was back when we didn't fly around the planet giving a virus the possibility of spreading to the entire globe within a few days...
We have more people, and more rapid air travel, and denser cities than ever before... and yet no pandemics on the scale of the 1918 flu.
Maybe, having more people, more rapid air travel, and denser cities is actually helping herd immunity?
Any nasty virus has milder cousins. Milder cousin viruses spread faster, because those infected keep going to work and traveling, and show/suffer fewer symptoms. And these milder cousins serve as a natural inoculation against the nastier versions.
- graeme 14y agoI've written elsewhere on this thread that pandemics are not predictable. They are rare, non-linear events. We simply can't conclude anything from the statement 'no pandemics on 1918 scale since 1918'. 3,000 years from now, looking back, people might say that 1918 was the start of the end of pandemics, or that 1918-2013 was an unusually quiet period that preceded a major pandemic. With such a limited timescale, how can we possibly tell?