My mother got Diphtheria and survived because “I didn’t know I was supposed to die.” And my dad survived Typhoid. She had heart problems all her life, and he was deaf in one ear.
Typhoid killed off most of his immediate family, leaving only three sisters and him. The sisters were all left with varying degrees of deafness in both ears.
So COVID-19 isn’t the worst thing to hit this country, but it is the one that gets the most hype.
We are in an entirely new communications environment. Nothing in the past ... not a celebrity's breasts, not a disease, not a cute cat ... has ever been hyped the way any of them can be today.