It is nonsensical but not because of the way the viruses evolved - if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event! With SARS1 we actually managed to make a vaccine - we just didn't end up needing it.
> if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event!
That depends quite a bit on how rapidly it spreads. If COVID had started with Omicron's level of infectiousness, it'd have been a dramatically more deadly pandemic.
Agreed, but then the response to its infectiousness would have been different as well! And even Omicron wouldn't rise to anything close to an extinction event, it is like the opposite of MERS, way better at transmission, relatively bad at killing.
If the first wave of SARS-Cov-2 was Omicron we'd have seen a worse 1st wave on net, but a far higher survival rate, more population immunity pre-vaccine.. and part of me thinks that the response would have been better, the original SARS-Cov-2 hit a bit of a sweet-spot in terms of political accountability with respect to how slowly it moved across the world and the gradual build up of hospital crisis in most places (1st wave hot-spots excepted of course).
