> I wonder if there's an actual upper bound in the frequency of global pandemics. Is it possible that we could even have simultaneous pandemics?
There's literally always a "mystery disease" happening somewhere in the world. Particularly in the third world, where malnutrition and deaths from preventable illnesses are rampant.
Unfortunately, since 2020 it's trivial clickbait for reporters to just repeat this stuff without providing context. At least in this case, if one bothers to read article you see that this is indeed an example of bad health outcomes linked to severe poverty.
COVID is scary at personal scales and it did deeply traumatize us all, but at statistic scale it had 3.5% or so of mortality rate among unvaccinated humans. That isn't going to put us onto a list of endangered species.
And that's only 1 percent point more than the global infant(<1yo) mortality rate right now. Or 4x less percentages than Soviet losses in WWII(13.7% wtf), or 5x less than French losses in Napoleonic wars(5m out of 30m or so).
It's not worth assuming antivax style denialist attitudes against a COVID-class crisis, but it's also no factor for survival of humans the species. Only damaging to like, medium term economies and profits. We'd grow back just fine so long we'd wear masks, eat well, and get vaccinated as needed in timely manners.
