So people don't know when they are ill?
After a test, to know if one is ill because one can't tell, one will always need that next test to be sure, for each day passes, and "tomorrow is another day" with other opportunities to be ill, because now being without symptoms means you too can be ill. But only with Covid. What about influenza tests? Pneumonia tests? Other respiratory illness tests?
Time to invest in test makers. Or stop worrying.
Some people know they are ill. I knew I was ill Saturday but couldn’t get in for a test. Anyway fever passed but other symptoms of what seem to be omicron type came up. Maybe it’s just a coincidence and not covid at all. I wait for the results. I don’t know whether to hope for covid or not since I feel pretty much OK except for the nasty cough and digestive issue. I think it will pass soon enough. So do I hope it is “mild covid” and now maybe have natural immunity, or do I hope it was something else?
Some don’t know they are ill. The asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic for example. This vaccine passport system is an abysmal idea, so poorly thought out. So you got jabbed you get to congregate in crowded places. Hooray! But the jab doesn’t stop the disease from spreading at all. So all the jabbed are super spreading to other jabbed. We are led by a bunch of blathering idiots.
AS for all other communicable diseases - no political or financial gain from that.
Certain viruses have the extremely beneficial (to the virus) characteristic of typically being exceedingly infectious before the victim feels significantly ill. COVID-19 is one of them. Flu is not.(!) Colds vary all over the place, with some similar in this respect to COVID. (Depending on the source, there have been either 600+ or 1000+ different cold viruses identified — lots of room for “diversity”!)
I don’t know of any other pathogen with COVID’s “total package” of characteristics. “Novel” applies to it in more ways than one. It is a very GOOD package for the present time, from the standpoint of the virus — I suppose the question is why it would not have occurred long ago, naturally. I think even my Dad would be stumped on that one. Perhaps such packages HAVE developed before, and over centuries all eventually became milder / “common colds”. Anything over 100 years ago, a “COVID-19” might well have started cutting into the reproductive portion of the human population, creating pressure to mutate milder.
In any event, in the key detail of when a spreader becomes highly infectious, COVID-19, and especially the later variants that take “highly infectious” to a whole ‘nother level, are VERY different from flu.
As in many things, “the Devil is in the details”.