So a lot of people want to know why COVID-19 is such a big deal, even as death rates are climbing and ICUs are overwhelmed. After all, diseases have always existed, right? So why is this one the crisis?

This one is the crisis because it's something epidemiologists have been warning about for years: a novel disease (meaning we have no community resistance), with easy person-to-person transmission, that has managed to catch on in the population.

H1N1 was a big deal. People died. But it was still a flu, and we had the building blocks for a vaccine already tested and ready to work with. SARS was a big deal. People died. But it failed to catch on, and it withered.

Every one of these "missed bullets" has spared lives and risked future ones, because it made people complacent about pandemics. "Oh, every few years the doctors freak out about something new, and then it turns out to be nothing" crept into common thinking.

A novel virus basically has free run of the population; no one has the necessary antibodies to fight it off, and we don't have the cultural antibodies to tell us what progression and recovery look like. Humans are social creatures, so we try to keep our loved ones close.

During a novel pandemic, this can be deadly.

I was trying hard to come up with cognates for this last night, and two most recent I could find that fit the terms--novel virus, human-to-human transmission, clawhold on the community--were the Black Death in Europe, and smallpox in North America.

People learned to live with both those diseases, but in the beginning, they were devastating. Without smallpox, the European colonists might never have conquered a continent, because everywhere they went, the spotted monster ran ahead and wiped out communities.

These were people who had come to such a detente with smallpox that they used Old King Pox as a weapon once they realized what was happening--the infamous smallpox blankets--and smallpox STILL killed their non-resistant children.

Because even once smallpox ceased to be a novel virus for a European population, it stayed deadly and kept killing people. And that's what we're looking at with COVID-19 until we have a vaccine.

But culturally, we're no longer set up for coping with "and then everyone else in my house got sick and died and I alone survived." I can't say that was ever GOOD for people, but it used to be a lot more normal.

The psychological damage of trying to just push through a novel pandemic as if everything is normal can't be overstated. And no, COVID-19 won't kill everyone who catches it, but how do you code if you KNOW you were the vector that killed your parents? Your kids?

COVID-19 isn't just "a bad flu" or anything like that, because it's a new monster, one we haven't encountered before. We still have weapons we can use. Soap. Gloves. Closed doors. We just have to be strong enough to use them.

People keep pointing out other modern pandemics as some kind of "gotcha"--ah-ha, you didn't mention HIV, you must not have done as much of the reading as you say you did!

Y'all, I did the reading. I lost people to HIV. But HIV never came bundled with EASY person-to-person transmission, and it has still killed millions. I am not lessening that loss, or attempting to downplay it. I'm just saying, this is a different ballgame.

My tabletop RPGs have never done property damage. My LARPs have. Format and transmission mechanism matter. In this case, the people in charge had to acknowledge the disease a lot earlier, because anyone can catch it. That's good.

(The fact that HIV could be ignored as long as it was, because it was killing the "right" people, is a war crime, and should have been prosecuted.)

But something like ebola, which is relatively difficult to catch, or like HIV, which requires intimate contact, is very different than something with a casual community fomite transmission vector.

It can't. I have the reader apps blocked for scraping and monitizing my content without my consent.