Measles isn’t taken seriously by many people — they think it’s just a childhood illness. It’s true that most people have herd immunity to measles, bought and paid for by all the children who died of it over the centuries. It’s a much worse illness than Covid19 in a virgin field epidemic, where nobody has much resistance to the disease because their immune systems haven’t seen it before.
We are incredibly lucky with Covid19, the sickness caused by SARS-CoV2. No, really, we are. It seems to only kill about 1–2% of people who get it if there’s treatment available. It doesn’t seem to kill children at all, and young people rarely.
Do you realise how wonderful that is? How gobstoppingly abnormal for a newly human-adapted virgin field pandemic? Seriously?
Compared with epidemic disease in the past — even as recently as the 20th century, for Pete’s sake — that is nothing at all. Zilch. Zero.
A sense of proportion
Now some of you may be mourning the death of someone close to you from Covid19, or you may be vulnerable and frightened of dying of it yourself, so you may not like to read that. I totally understand: statistics talk of 1 or 2% mortality, but if you lose someone that figure is really 100%. If your parent or your spouse or, worst of all, your child is threatened…
