How unique is Covid-19?

Being somewhat drawn to the Covid-doomer persuasion myself, I appreciate the reminder from Miloš Miljković that we should step back and consider the context of both what we know about other viruses, and the impact of things that are associated with, but not unique to, Covid - such as having to be hospitalised - before assigning uniquely nightmarish impacts to this particular condition.

Or, perhaps more pertinent to consider, what we don’t actually know. There are a ton of valuable studies out there on the subject, but as the article notes, oftentimes they’re not constructed in a way that would allow us to tease apart the special impact of Covid-19 vs being ill in some other way.

…there are two things that could be happening here.

Either a humanity-ending event occurred somewhere near the end of 2021 and we are living a somewhat prolonged but inevitable decline in which so many people will have symptoms of long covid that civilization as we know it will end (queue “the Forever Plague”).

Or maybe, just maybe, we experienced a once-in-a generation spread of a new virus – new to us but something humanity has had to deal with throughout its existence – at a time when we have the means to analyze its genome, our genome, its proteins, our proteins, the cells it infects, our cells responding to the infection, the microbiome, the food, the water, the air, the animals and yes, even art.

I’m still not sure that long Covid et al isn’t an actual catastrophe. It indisputably is catastrophic at an individual level for certain unlucky people. I know some of them. So many of us do. It can be devastating. But Miljković’s points are useful to consider when thinking about how to put the impact of Covid in the context of everything else that goes on in our world.

Getting the baseline right is always so critical to thinking about the impact of anything, especially when it concerns big scary impacts.