Reply to CORONAVIRUS/COVID-19 NEW MEGA THREAD

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s amazing how we all go on before vaccines for the flu, chicken pox, etc.  Are today’s generations just softer and less tolerant of illness?[/quote]

Umm, lots of people died.  Some people had chicken pox parties or measles parties for their children, because it was better to get it as a child than later.  But even then, people still died, children and adults.

There were fewer autoimmune diseases though. [/quote]

I have thought about this a lot. I think that part of it is, yes, we are just softer.  A hundred years ago, people just understood that a certain percentage of their children would not survive childhood.  I've done genealogical research and it appears that, at least for my family of immigrants, it was typically about 20-30% of children who died with those sorts of illnesses.  Also, people assumed that old people would be killed by something like pneumonia or diarrhea.  It was very, very common.  I think it was also very, very sad every single time it happened.  But people didn't really have much choice but to keep going, including going to work so that their surviving children would not starve.

But they also didn't have a lot of NOVEL infections.  So even though things went in waves through the communities, the odds are that most people in the community had survived a previous wave and had some degree of immunity.  (Which is why little children were particularly vulnerable.)  Novel outbreaks have always been catastrophic.  Smallpox coming to America is a good example.  Utterly catastrophic because there was zero previous immunity.  (The 1918 flu is a less catastrophic example -- novel, but still related to previous flus that had circulated, so maybe not as bad.)[/quote]

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