The end of the Flu Pandemic 100 years ago:
Most histories of the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed at least 50 million people worldwide say it ended in the summer of 1919 when a third wave of the respiratory contagion finally subsided.
Yet the virus continued to kill. A variant that emerged in 1920 was lethal enough that it should have counted as a fourth wave. In some cities — among them, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Kansas City, Mo. — deaths exceeded even those in the second wave, responsible for the vast majority of the pandemic’s deaths in the United States and elsewhere. This occurred despite the fact that the U.S. population had plenty of natural immunity from the influenza virus after two years of infections and after viral lethality in the third wave decreased.
I wonder if pandemics end, not when they stop infecting and killing people in large numbers, but when a critical mass of the public gets too weary of disease mitigation efforts to keep them up. People go back to normal just because they crave normal even if carrying on normally is what earlier in the pandemic would be considered too dangerous to try. A lot of deaths still happen, but because people are used to it the numbers don't seem so shocking anymore. We don't go back to the pre pandemic normal. But we go into a new post-pandemic normal, which accepts a lot of needless death and suffering as just the cost of society doing business.
It really looks like this is what is already happening.
NYT May 24, 2020: U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) February 5, 2022
NYT February 5, 2022: 900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On pic.twitter.com/CfRccN7ijy
