Pandemics have plagued (yes) humanity since perhaps before recorded history, although history records its first in the reign of Justinian in 541 CE, later confirmed to be the same bacterium that caused the Black Death or Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages.
The deadliest of modern times was the 1918 Influenza, which killed an estimated 675,000 in the US and perhaps 50 million worldwide. I posted a note about that flu in March of 2020, as the reality of COVID 19 began to emerge. Even with modern testing, COVID’s toll is necessarily an educated guess, but it has killed at least 4,739,231 worldwide as of today and counting. In the US it has now killed 687,096, more than the 1918 flu, and growing at a current pace of about 2000 daily deaths.
Some point to the Delta variant as the reason that COVID remains with us at the levels we suffer, and certainly the disease has grown more contagious and perhaps more deadly, but this also happened in 1918-19 as the flu circled the earth twice. That argument, however, overlooks that COVID has killed a vastly higher percentage of Americans than worldwide: far less than 1% of the world, by my calculations one in about 1600 worldwide, yet over 1 in 500 here. One would hope that our costly medical resources would have made us safer than elsewhere, and they may have helped, but have been overcome by whatever has led so many to live in, and too often die from, vaccine denialism. One’s odds of dying from COVID are now substantially greater than a pedestrian crossing the street, and probably much more among the unvaccinated.
I find it tempting to rail against those who endanger themselves and the vaccinated by refusing to take two shots but being willing to take untested remedies such as horse dewormers. Many of the unvaccinated deny natural selection, but somehow have chosen to risk the Darwinism of herd immunity, even at the risk of their own lives and those they love. They render aid to the first horseman of the Apocalypse, riding his white horse and spreading pestilence upon the world.
When all is said and too little done, will enough be left to speak the last words of regret and of woe?
