Well, there has been a lot of 'skepticism' that amounts to cherry picking whatever facts allow people to believe what they please. I think the fact remains that COVID was and is extraordinarily dangerous, and that's evidenced by the enormous casualty figures, even in countries that were supposed to be well prepared.

I think there's a simple difference in scale between this other events, that makes it hard to assimilate - COVID was, statistically, the most deadly single natural disaster to happen to my country (the UK) in a century. That's hard to relate to, hard to make policy about, hard to put in perspective. Bear in mind the last pandemic (Spanish Flu) was before antibiotics, before oxygen, before all of the techniques that made COVID something you can treat to some degree of success in a hospital.

> COVID was, statistically, the most deadly single natural disaster to happen to my country (the UK) in a century

Technically true because of the "natural disaster" qualifier, but the world wars killed 890k and 450k Brits.

And smoking killed 750k in the last decade. And now that's been overtaken by obesity.

COVID won't even come close to touching that.

Manmade disasters have fearful consequences too. Perhaps that makes it easier to "relate to."

I guess for me it seems different to normal public health stuff because of the speed - but perhaps your second world war figure is exactly what I am getting at. COVID is on the same scale as the UK's losses in the second world war - it's worse than the blitz, for example, but less deadly than the entire british involvement. The second world war caused seismic political and cultural changes in the UK. It's probably the most significant moment in the UK's history since the napoleonic wars.

Now, I don't think casualty figures alone provoke the kind of reassessment and realignment that made WW2 such a watershed, but honestly, I think they probably should.