>>12793709You can't "just ignore it lmao". Remember there are like 5 billion more people on the planet than in 1918, and almost all of them have the ability to travel halfway across the planet in 1 day. Literally every single infection is a petri dish for Covid to establish new mutations for overcoming natural immunity, if we ignore Covid and it'll evolve to be even more aggressive and resistant than it already has, think 5-6 spikes in cases versus the 3 in our timeline so far.
Anyways, there are so many people on the planet, the virus has such a large host reservoir, it can just keep infecting more and more people to build up enough mutations for reinfection of its previously recovered hosts, which then starts the cycle all over again. Notoriously in the P.2 lineage we've seen massive amounts of reinfections with it, imagine a P.2-like virus coming out every 3 months or so if we just ignore it. We (humanity) are essentially trapped by our numbers, as reaching a population density where the virus can turn benign would mean half the planet has to die, not exactly feasible, what with our shit concept of modern morality.
