It’s easy to say Americans will just merrily go about their business with even a 10% case fatality rate, but that’s ascribing a level of irrationality to them that is simply not reasonable. Tell people they have a 10% chance of dying if they go out to a restaurant and not even the chuddiest chud doesn’t have that much of a death wish.
Covid was horrible, of course, but the reality is that there’s tens of millions of white middle class (and higher) Americans who at most lost a grandparent to Covid. It was a terribly deadly disease but it wasn’t deadly enough to people with adequate access to resources and health care for them to be able to not ignore it. Even a “good” CFR associated with bird flu could many orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID, you can’t take the Covid experience and extrapolate.
COVID kills you in the long term as it destroys your immune system and blood vessels
Climate change kills us all in the long term, but that hasn’t made the people on power take it seriously either.
Smoking gives you cancer, red meat is a carcinogen, alcohol is literal poison, candy is more addictive than cocaine, asbestos is good for insulating heat.
Not saying these are all the same, but people suck at caring about anything other than short-term consequences and that’s when they’re being informed about them.
I don’t necessarily disagree that people in the US would take a bird flu pandemic with a much higher fatality rate than COVID more seriously. I do think it’s worth pointing out that COVID is still a serious problem that the vast majority of people are ignoring even if they know it means putting their well-being at risk. Even according to the CDC, COVID has been killing an average of 525 people in the US a week over the last 12 weeks. To compare, gun violence deaths minus suicides in the US in 2024 was about 319 deaths per week. It’s also well known at this point that even a “mild” COVID infection comes with significant risks of long term complications, from a severely increased chance of heart attack and stroke, to neurological issues, to damage to the immune system, and more.
Obviously it is not killing as many people as it did early in the pandemic, nor is it anywhere near 10% CFR, but it is still something that people should be concerned over and yet are not. I’ve talked to many people who know these things, who agree that COVID is still something worth worrying about, and yet do not mask or even keep their vaccines up to date. These are normal people, not even your Q-Anon freaks. It worries me to imagine having to rely on those same people in the potential bird flu pandemic.
