Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.

That's why it is important to take news of incidents and location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a patient and as medical staff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onzL0EM1pKY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone

There's entire chapters of this:

"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "

Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.

This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.

Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.

That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.

How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus? Really?

Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that would have been impossible considering what percentage of the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for that whopper.

Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National Institute of Health btw.

"For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."

In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics was historically.

All of my friends, extended family and friends of friends got Covid. Nobody died. The only people that died had pre-existing conditions.

To the vast majority of the population, it was similar to a bad cold.

So you’re going on a walk one day, they seem friendly, people like handling cute animals… bada big bada boom

Frankly, I’m sad masks aren’t still more of a thing. I don’t want to wear one all the time, but if you’re sick and need to be in a public place, throw one on out of consideration for your peers.

Likewise, I would add "obviously": I have never seen "obvious" used to describe anything which is obvious, only things which are not.

The phrase "common sense" is even worse, as about half the time it points to claims that are in fact false.

So, in this case, surgical masks: you say it's "obvious" they're not good enough and compare them to a mesh bag. Perhaps they are that bad, but it's not obvious, and "common sense"* suggests to me that surgeons, who are necessarily working with unwell and often immunocompromised people, will desire something that doesn't let one of the surgical team put a random bacterial mix into someone's new kidney when they sneeze.

* I am aware of the irony; and yes, despite this I can also name a famous example where surgeons collectively were very wrong