• schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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    4 days ago

    The problem was it was too quick: if you died of COVID, you were dead. You could be memory-holed and everyone would simply forget you and move on.

    If you had Polio, though, you were paralyzed and stuck in a metal tube and kept alive.

    Can’t forget your not-dead kid who lives in a tube, and thus it was treated as more of a thing that should be fought because there was a clear and visible reminder of what this disease was doing to everyone’s kids.

    If COVID left a couple million people living in tubes, then we absolutely would have treated it differently, but it didn’t.

    (Alternately, if COVID had killed 10 or 20 million people, we would have also treated it seriously: it just wasn’t sufficiently deadly OR left a wake of broken, but living, people.)

    • GiddyGap@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      Also, older people were more prone to dying from Covid. That left a lot of room for conspiracy theories regarding what actually killed them. Heard of lot of conservative family members say “oh, it was probably just a bad flu that killed them.” And when the vaccines came out that quickly changed to “the vaccine killed them.”

      • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 days ago

        My dad died due to COVID and one of the dipshits we hired to help load his stuff into a moving truck kept going on about how incredulous he was that anyone would die from “the flu”. These people, they are not intelligent.

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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        4 days ago

        Yeah, I remember the ‘grandma wanted to die for the economy!’ ghouls.

        And the ‘it’s just a flu!’ people pissed me the fuck off. Like have you morons never HAD the flu? It’s not like the flu is somehow pleasant and fun. You don’t want the flu! Nobody wants the flu! You idiots got a flu shot, get your damn covid shot.

        • derfunkatron@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          And the ‘it’s just a flu!’ people pissed me the fuck off.

          I think many people haven’t actually had the flu or have had it after a vaccination or a during mild year.

          That shit is awful, and it can and has killed. Hell, 100 years before COVID there was the 1918 Flu Epidemic which killed nearly three times as many people as COVID. So when some chucklefuck prattles on about “it’s just the flu,” my response is always, “that doesn’t make it safer.”