@75, eh, they can't backpettle to save face. Or they won't. I feel like they're the kind of person who will keep pushing and pushing their narrative until everyone agrees with them all so they can have the last laugh. Quite sad, really.

speaking of it, i think normal flu kills a lot of people in a year, much more than this, but i think, more fear means more caution or something like that, or maybe not and generally the current am brings us back to very, simpler, yet enjoying times. that's what i took from this thing

If anyone wants to contest that I can easily whip up a program to run the math on historical COVID information. Wouldn't be an overly difficult project.

@82, I already have it. Using the disease.sh API, I was able to retrieve their entire COVID-19 dataset, covering 743 days (from 2020-01-22 to 2022-02-02). From January 22, 2020 to February 22, 2020, cases rose from just 557 to over 76000. At the end of March they rose to 876000. Moving all the way to December, cases increased by over 9,500 percent, capping at 83760525. In 2020 alone, there were an average of 21.9 million cases, 672.1 thousand deaths, and 13.6 million recoveries. In 2021, cases rose from a mere 83760525 (at the end of 2020) to 288330906 (at the end of 2021). Deaths increased from 1880794 to 5439640. At the end of January of this year, cases increased from 288330906 to 378391869 and deaths increased from 5439640 to 5674374 (that is, there have been 234734 deaths in 31 days).
Recovery information is harder to get a handle on. For some reason I'm getting a large number of zeros for a lot of days, instead of an increasing number like there have been in 2020, so I'm not quite sure how to interpret that (someone might need to help me with that part).
I can't give accurate influenza information since I only have datasets for 2019 and 2020, and pretty small datasets at that. But according to the ILI dataset from the CDC, influenza and friends only caused 19376 deaths (I think) and hospitals only received 1371083 patients from weeks 40-51 of 2020. That's actually quite tame for ILIs.

@83 that is some crazy numbers

So, if you want to know how folks would have acted if it were HIV, consider this.
Even though we had a pretty good idea that HIV was blood-born and not anywhere near the same kind of risk as something like Covid-19 as far as pure infection chance goes, we had dozens upon dozens of conservative talking heads demonizing homosexual men. It became the norm to overhype the ability to catch the disease, and to do everything possible to blame it on gay men and their unsafe or dirty sex practices. (note, I am absolutely not saying that I believe those practices were unsafe or dirty, I'm not demonizing this population at all.)

So we already know what happened, sort of. Conservatives basically want someone to blame it on, a group to "other". Liberals and leftists were (and are) busy trying to fix it, trying to get people protected.

I was thinking about conservatism in general this afternoon, and I synthesized the entire ideology into a really basic premise:
Conservatism is marked by an in-group, which is protected but not bound by laws, and an out-group, which is bound but not protected by those laws.

I'm sorry you and your mom have serious health issues. If I understood correctly, you didn't get Covid shots. I'm asking because I've been recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I'm on meds (also, I'm going to buy trulicity online and give it a try). But I worry about getting a booster, especially after two of my friends got sick (fever, weakness, headache).

@89, most of your posts are to old topics. Can you please stop doing that?

@89, we got both vaccinations plus the first booster. Second booster is on hold now beause the whole family ended up catching it in August. Thankfully, nothing major happened, no longterm symptoms.

Also, I think one person scolding him for reviving an old topic is enough. Three or more piling on is almost as pointless as reviving the thread in the first place.