Re: History is bunk
The 1956 pandemic (emergence of H1N2) was relatively mild but it still killed about 4 million people worldwide - and it was notable as the first year that flu vaccines utterly failed (they were all geared towards H1N1 - which went extinct in humans that year). The 1968 pandemic (emergence of H1N3) killed around 2 million
Fusses WERE made. One of the reasons they didn't hit as hard as they could have was that 1918 left a legacy of watchfulness, living memoey and early warning systems which was formalised in the 1970s after Ebola and finally ended up in the USA with its own administration under Obama after many years as a sub department
MERS and SARS should have been pandemics. They were headed off. The Mango Menace destroyed the early warning intelligence gathering system which could have warned that Chinese regional administrators were covering things up from the central medical oversight authority and perhaps resulted in COVID being another footnote in history instead of the worst Pandemic since 1918 (comparable to the 1895 "russian flu" pandemic which it appears closely related to and only slightly less deadly than 1918)
If you don't think fusses were made in 1895 and 1918, then you haven't studied history, and if you're old enough to remember 1956, then you're too young to remember how the experienced adults in the room reacted to it.
The biggest problem with COVID is that a really bad pandemic is beyond living memory and the last one was so bad that most areas of the world suppressed it from folk memory by not talking about it. Those orphans in 1920s movies needed no explanation to 1920s audiences and 1930s kids simply took the meme for granted