>>12822705Dont look at things in a vacuum. The total contagious disease rate per year is a certain value. That value is a total of all diseases spread through contact. You can treat this combined effect of deaths caused by preventable spread of disease as a single number.
If a new thing comes along which increases that beyond some threshold then the measures taken are the same for all transmissible diseases : quarantine everyone. This stops all spread.
We, rather selfishly, have always been allowing this sort of thing to occur because normies gotta norm with their parties and vacations to go see uninteresting tourist attractions. We handled it by having medical capability built up to treat and deal with the load caused by these behaviors. A sudden spike however breaks the balance, hence the initial 'flatten the curve' meme.
The main issue at hand though is as i described. Whether or not we should have acted in the case of covid is only a secondary matter compared to the fact that we now know we are entirely helpless. We could wipe out this and other diseases if we could build a society where people just simultaneously quarantine for a couple weeks every year. This could dramatically slow the transmission of all sorts of diseases, effectively wiping it out of the human population and needing us to catch it from animals again.
This would also allow us to have security against truly horrific disease.
The last year however has demonstrated we are incapable of this, as there are people who will simply naturally do the exact opposite of what ever they are told.
