“You’re not a BIRD, Susan. I expect to see you at your desk on Monday.” --asshole bosses

Probably lower carbon emissions too

The Canadian government would still bring his its employees back first, just to prove a point

Except Darwin giggles with glee

This isn’t how people work I think. Instead you will have people who have been primed by prior experience that their ignorance worked out. EG people who by dint of age and health only ever had <1/10th of 1% of dying from covid didn’t get vaccinated and had covid 3 times and are fine LEARNED that vaccinating isn’t important.

If there is a 50% mortality event they will have learned that their shit works long enough to catch it and die while listening to their facebook groups tell them they just need to take some vitamin C. They’ll keep telling each other its all a scam, just normal flue, someone will chime in that they’ve already had it months prior to this being even possible. They’ll shit talk until they die in their houses.

Something with a mortality rate of 50% won’t spread the way Covid did, it’d kill the host too fast

I’m going to miss dairy cheese but I am willing to accept dramatic reductions in non-vegan food for the good of the world. Some people just lose their mind over the idea of eating less animal products though.

Google trends, see my reply to the other comment. Epidemiology Twitter has a bunch of related chatter on the topic too.

If you want to dive into a data topic like this my first stop is Twitter to see what the experts are saying, then Google trends to see how that translates into searches the mass public are making while dealing with it.

Google trends. Ask it questions like “why is my cat bleeding” or “why is my dog bleeding” and look at trends and localization over the last 3mo. Search in both English and Spanish to capture data from native Spanish speakers (the bulk of the workforce at meat processing plants) and their extended communities.

Google h5n1 symptoms in cats and dogs (bleeding from the eyes, ass, high fever, pink eye, seizures, etc) and come up with queries that everyday people might Google (like: “why is my dog bleeding from his privates” because Americans can’t say “anus”) and go from there.

I haven’t really kept track of all of the queries we looked through over the last couple of months, this was more my SO’s thing. Epidemiologist Twitter probably has some good data too.

Off the top of my head pink eye in dogs, cats with seizures, cats bleeding from their eyes, dogs bleeding from the ass, high fevers, etc all had pretty narrow localization around major industrialized meat packing plants or industrial scale livestock farming.