Covid-19: căn bệnh của nhà giàu

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John Tamny imagines if the virus had never been detected. A slice:

As this column has long stated, the coronavirus is a rich man’s virus. It’s not just that the rich and generally well-to-do had portable jobs that mostly survived the mindless (đơn giản, không cần động não; thiếu suy xét, dại dột) lockdowns, it’s not just that the break from reality we were forced to endure could have only happened in a rich country, it’s also the case that only in a country and world in which the elderly are truly old would the virus have any notable association with death. People live longer today, and they do because major healthcare advances born of wealth creation made living longer possible. We wouldn’t have noticed this virus 100 years ago. We weren’t rich enough.

Which brings us to a recent article by Leah Rosenbaum at Forbes. She wrote about a NIH paper indicating that almost 17 million coronavirus cases went uncounted last summer. In Rosenbaum’s words, this discovery “suggests the pandemic was much more widespread in the U.S. than previously thought.” Well, of course.

Lest readers forget, the virus began spreading sometime in the fall of 2019, if not sooner. The epicenter is widely thought to have been China, and flights between the U.S. and China, along with flights from China to the rest of the world, were rather numerous right up until 2020.

Considering how connected China was and still is to the rest of the world, logic dictates that the virus was infecting people globally long before politicians panicked. In that case, it’s not surprising that estimates made about the number of infected Americans were always way too low. The virus is said to spread easily, even easier than the flu, and it once again started working its way around the world sometime in 2019.

Notable about its rapid spread is that life went on as it made its way around the world. As the closing months of 2019 make plain, people lived with the virus. What is most lethal to older people isn’t much noticed by those who aren’t old. A rapidly spreading virus was seemingly not much of a factor until politicians needlessly made it one.

Indeed, a virus most lethal to the very old has meek qualities when met by younger people. If they’re infected with it, all-too-many don’t find the symptoms worrisome enough that they actually get tested.

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