Reply to post: Re: An elephant in the room @W@Ido

Re: An elephant in the room @W@Ido

I think you have to remember that this is the first global pandemic since the 1919 Flu pandemic. Back then, there was no global media, the best news was from newspapers that took days or weeks to get around the globe (as did the pandemic!)

There was no national health systems *anywhere*. There were no effective vaccinations. People died by the million, but there were no systems to accurately record what happened. Local health care was not even there to be overwhelmed.

People just died where they lived. But then again, people died more frequently back then. Poverty was endemic in almost every country around the world even without the pandemic. We'd just been through a World War, and people died. The population was numb to further deaths. And often the people who were worst effected were the unimportant, little people, who individually disappeared without even being counted.

We have had a century of improved health systems, improved social conditions, improved life expectancy, better accounting. People expect to live, not to die (at least not until they get old). And we are not so faceless, we have birth and death records which record why people die that can be queried in mere days. We notice now like never before.

And anybody, even the poorest in what you might consider as third world countries, have opportunities through technology and social media to have their stories recorded.

This is the first pandemic where for a large part of the world, we can measure in near real time the effect, and we have shock headlines written in minutes not days. In many countries we have come to expect that even if we get ill, the support is there for us to survive. We are in shock that it now can't.

We've never been able to watch something like this unfold before. It is different, and it will never be the same unless we have a technology crash. You just can't compare previous situations. They are not the same.

Humanity as a whole will survive. But that doesn't tell you how many or who will die.