After the Black Death which took about a third of the population of Europe in a few years, there was an immense Depression. The plague came back every ten to twenty years and wiped out half of the new generation of children. The Depression continued for many years, probably fifty to a hundred.

What caused the Depression? Shortage of labour. There simply weren't enough people in some areas to till the fields and grow food. Villages like Wharram Percy in Yorkshire were completely wiped out: their fields went to waste and reforested themselves.

The nobility tried enforcing low wages by law and failed, thanks to Peasant Revolts and simple attrition. If the lord wasn't paying enough, his peasants simply left.

At this time almost all tasks needed human muscle to achieve with a bit of animal muscle. However clever people started coming up with something else: wind and water power and built amazing machines out of wood to use the new forms of power.

Yes, it was a proto-Industrial Revolution and it saved the nobility's bacon, because they had the resources to experiment with wind and water power which the peasantry generally didn't.

Are you seeing a pattern forming here?

Probably pandemics are a major modernising influence: human musclepower gets replaced with something better and cheaper to the rich - wind and water, steam, electricity, digital. And less human.

Once it was land and peasants that made you rich. Then it was just land (and still is).

Humans can imagine the specific if it's someone they know, someone they love. They can't imagine 300,000 people.

Also the predatory capitalists have made sure that white people know it's mostly the old and sick, the brown and black who will get ill. They're quite happy to let the elders die (especially the fat and diabetic) if that also kills off the brown and the black people too. They can't imagine it ever being them - so what we really need is a variant that selectively attacks white young people.

Then we'll get some action.