ceased to represent the society-disrupting threat that I'd planned for when I was with the DOD; one of my operational plans was how the department would support civil authorities during a flu pandemic like the 1918 flu. Initial covid projections showed a potential mortality rate of 3% with a R0 of 4.5 That was pretty terrifying and aligned with the planning factors we employed when we crafted what kind of support the DOD could reasonably offer the US. Covid wasn't THAT bad. Retrospectively in those early days when everyone was dying in the ICU, we were seeing a mortality rate of 2%. Still bad, but we weren't routinely hitting people with steroids because all the literature for acute respiratory distress didn't routinely call for steroids. And we obviously didn't have remdesivir or paxlovid.

What's worse, we didn't even have fukcing masks and we still had to care for people in extremis at risk to ourselves. In my case, I had a pregnant wife. I had a supply of N95s simply because I prep like a mormon due to my experience as an operations planner prior to going to med school. That one plan made he hyper vigilant any time a new respiratory virus emerged and the WHO elevated pandemic risk. But I still took a bath in rubbing alcohol and doffed all my clothes the minute I walked in the door to minimize the risk to my wife.