Compared with that, with COVID-19 we get the “it’s just a flu” opinion, which for me is like anti-vaxers (whom I also don’t consider a proper Culture War).
My sense is “it’s just a flu” is a conflict of values; there are people for whom regular influenza is cause for alarm and perhaps changing policies (about a year ago, I had proposed to friends the thought experiment of an annual quarantine week, wondering whether it would actually reduce the steady-state level of disease or if I was confused about how that dynamical system worked), and there are people who think that cowardice is unbecoming and illness is an unavoidable part of life. That is, some think the returns to additional worry and effort are positive; others think they are negative.
you either assume a worldwide conspiracy of doctors that keep healthy people needlessly attached to ventilators, or you admit it’s not just a flu.
Often people describe medications as “safer than aspirin”, but this is sort of silly because aspirin is one of the more dangerous medications people commonly take, grandfathered in by being discovered early. In a normal year, influenza is responsible for over half of deaths due to infectious disease in the US; the introduction of a second flu would still be a public health tragedy, from my perspective.
(Most people, I think, are operating off the case fatality rate instead of the mortality per 100k; in 2018, influenza killed about 2.5X as many people as AIDS in the US, but people are much more worried about AIDS than the flu, and for good reason.)
My sense is “it’s just a flu” is a conflict of values; there are people for whom regular influenza is cause for alarm and perhaps changing policies (about a year ago, I had proposed to friends the thought experiment of an annual quarantine week, wondering whether it would actually reduce the steady-state level of disease or if I was confused about how that dynamical system worked), and there are people who think that cowardice is unbecoming and illness is an unavoidable part of life. That is, some think the returns to additional worry and effort are positive; others think they are negative.
Often people describe medications as “safer than aspirin”, but this is sort of silly because aspirin is one of the more dangerous medications people commonly take, grandfathered in by being discovered early. In a normal year, influenza is responsible for over half of deaths due to infectious disease in the US; the introduction of a second flu would still be a public health tragedy, from my perspective.
(Most people, I think, are operating off the case fatality rate instead of the mortality per 100k; in 2018, influenza killed about 2.5X as many people as AIDS in the US, but people are much more worried about AIDS than the flu, and for good reason.)