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”.
The devil is indeed in the details.
As posted earlier om this thread:
Worldometer data as of 26 January 2022,
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
USA -— First and WORST in overall deaths, and in dealing with the pandemic over twenty-five months
( 898,680 Covid deaths of Americans / 331,002,651 Americans ) x 100 = 0.27% of Americans “officially” Covid dead over twenty-five months.
The detail in this slice of the data picture is that twenty-five months is passed since the Drosten RT-PCR test was created in January of 2020, two months BEFORE the pandemic was even declared.
In the ensuing two years and more, the seemingly large stat of 898,680 as above is a small number in the larger scheme of things, considering the massive media “world is ending” rhetoric.
When the WHO created a new coding in April 2020 to name SARS CoV2 as a disease, the taxonomy was very broad and we know that such as other respiratory diseases were classified as Covid-19. We also know from many reports that deaths not from this “novel” respiratory disease were still classified — and therefore “data” collected — as Covid.
As to viruses, many are indeed very beneficial, as even a superficial look at the human virome attests. Covid-19 has been very “beneficial” to many, as the liability-shielded pharmaceuticals show. That the original taxonomy and reporting still generates huge anomalies suggests to me that the whole is quite a data mess.
But largest among it is the sowing of fear, lockdowns and massive economic disruption — all by governments tending away from freedom and towards authoritarianism.
Among the anomalies is the deaths per capita, widely disparate around the world. The US leads as a champion of deaths, and in many cases by a wide numerical margin. All this under our NIH, CDC, FDA, HHS and the liability-shielded pharmaceuticals.
Continuing to tally deaths into the now third year of this data collection and analysis is to feed the pandemic's negative socioeconomic and political effects.
How about tallying two years and more of any other causes of death?
Given that slightly more than one-quarter of one percent of Americans are “officially” dead of Covid-19 across over two years now says to me that this pandemic isn't what it is said to be.
Slightly more than one-quarter of one percent over two years in the US. That's what the “data” says.