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I'm inclined to think not, only because not enough people are actually dying to impel the living to reflect on their own mortality. This is not that, this is a media-fueled panic that is useful only insofar as it validates various actions that would otherwise be objectionable but that will at least ameliorate the impact and slow the contagion. What we also swallow in the meantime may well come back to haunt us.

I've been reading an interesting account of the real plague, Daniel DeFoe's Journal of the Plague Year, in which he details the various religious reactions of the people of London in the face of a disease flareup the like of which hadn't been seen for three centuries, from the fools and fakes who sold phony astrological cures to the courage of the clergy who stood to their posts through it all. A wonderful book, highly recommended, and it is fascinating to see the similarities in reactions of the civil authorities, then and now. For example, this on "bugging in":

I am speaking now of people made desperate by the apprehensions of their being shut up, and their breaking out by stratagem or force, either before or after they were shut up, whose misery was not lessened when they were out, but sadly increased. On the other hand, many that thus got away had retreats to go to and other houses, where they locked themselves up and kept hid till the plague was over; and many families, foreseeing the approach of the distemper, laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased, and then came abroad sound and well. I might recollect several such as these, and give you the particulars of their management; for, doubtless, it was the most effectual secure step that could be taken for such whose circumstances would not admit them to remove, or who had not retreats abroad proper for the case; for, in being thus shut up, they were as if they had been a hundred miles off. Nor do I recall that any one of those families miscarried. Among these several Dutch merchants were particularly remarkable, who kept their houses like little garrisons besieged, suffering none to go in or out or come near them...

Lots to learn there. Best to you!

[Lots to learn there. Best to you! ]

Same to you. I think the principal reason for the high mortality rates of the past during epidemics has to do with persistent malnutrition. In the best of times, the average person barely had enough to eat, and in hard times, he went hungry. This meant a host of nutritional deficiencies that left his immune system severely compromised. When a breadwinner was struck down by disease, his productivity was severely compromised even when he wasn’t bed-ridden. This meant further nutritional deficiency, hastening the ravages of disease, which eventually led to entire families and perhaps villages getting wiped out.

The Green Revolution a century ago means that 1% of the population produces enough food to make the other 99% obese, with enough surplus to export to godforsaken places like China.

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

So the likelihood is that malnutrition will not be the factor it was in the past, when 40% or more of the population was involved in agriculture even stateside, as late as the turn of the 20th century.

https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/US-Farms-Still-Feed-the-World-But-Farm-Jobs-Dwindle?gko=8741c
[It has long been an iconic U.S. industrial sector. It used to employ a very large proportion of the workforce — especially in the Midwest — and provide wages to people without advanced education. But over the decades, thanks to technology and modernization, employment has fallen persistently. In good years and bad, through war and peace, expansion and recession, the industry has slashed millions of jobs. Time was, virtually everybody either worked in this industry or knew somebody who did. But now? Probably only about 2 percent of workers toil in this sector.

Is this another tale of decline?

Well, it depends on how you look at it. Because I’m not talking about the embattled U.S. manufacturing sector. I’m talking about the world-beating U.S. agriculture sector.

Last week, we noted an apparent contradiction: The U.S. manufacturing sector produces near-record amounts of materials, measured by the dollar value of output, but employs far fewer people than it did several decades ago. This dichotomy is even more pronounced in agriculture. But the difference is that, on both a global and national basis, people tend to regard U.S. agriculture as an extremely healthy, world-beating sector: highly industrialized, remarkably efficient, an exporter that feeds the world.

It’s little appreciated now, but the U.S. was, for its first century, essentially an agricultural economy. (Hat-tip to an s+b reader for directing me to these great very long-run charts.) In the 19th century, well over 50 percent of the workforce labored on the farm. Yes, there were machines: the cotton gin, the thresher, the first tractors. But by and large, at the start of the 20th century, the U.S. needed a lot of people to farm a lot of land. In 1900, about 40 percent of the U.S. workforce toiled on farms. And you didn’t need a lot of education to qualify for these positions. (Less than 10 percent of the U.S. population had graduated high school.)]