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holy shit COVID never ended???
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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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COVID-19 Pandemic
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It can be generally said that many (most) viruses evolve to be non-lethal, as lethality reduces their ability to successfully reproduce and thrive. This was the most probable outcome, although epidemiologists warned that "most" doesn't mean all. Mutations are not predictable. Some viruses are horribly lethal.
Number 5 killer in 2025, and that's 5 years after killing off the most vulnerable.
Yeah the problem is they mutate in either direction, the "evolve to be non-lethal" part is essentially just natural selection doing its thing after the fact. But from time to time endemic viruses may just become way more lethal, as can be seen with the Spanish Flu in 1918-1920 and the Manchurian Plague in 1910-1911 (the latter having a death rate of close to 100% and being the reason face masks are widely used today). And while that could be controlled back then, it would be much harder today, given all the global traffic.
That's not correct. The influenza pandemic was not a new strain of influenza, it was a strain introduced to a naive population of soldiers taken from remote farm areas worldwide and concentrated into one small region of Europe. Then, the soldiers left the war and spread flu all across the remote areas of the US. The flu pandemics are more about naive populations. Same thing happened when Europeans first came to North America and wiped out indigenous populations with influenza.
Nah you are missing the point here. There was an already bad influenza strain, and millions of soldiers moving home on densely populated ships for weeks was a perfect environment for it to rapidly mutate and select for virulence and lethality. These soldiers making landfall then spread several strains of the virus, which led to vastly different mortality rates across the US. Much like we saw with Corona viruses rapidly mutating into different strains among the lockdowns.
It as only a "bad" strain because there was a massively immunologically naive population exposed to it.
Again, when Europeans brought over flu, it was minor to them, but killed off the natives. Similarly, native American and Inuit populations were killed at much higher rates in 1918. The Spanish Flu was not some kind of super flu, it was a typical influenza but there was a coincidental world war to spread it around from the US to Europe and back, likely from large US pig farms.
You can read about this here, or not.
https://www.kumc.edu/school-of-medicine/academics/departments/history-and-philosophy-of-medicine/archives/wwi/essays/medicine/influenza.html
Yeah no it don't think it was, maybe "strain" was the wrong word here. Death rates in Europe were also much higher than usual, so there was definitely some major mutation going on. Naive populations will certainly have played a part, but I still think the virus gaining a captive host population to mutate in for several generations on each of those troop transporters, before those incubated populations were then spread all over the country, had an effect on it being more deadly in America than it was in Europe. I mean even the article you linked seems to suggest as much: