Compared with other pathogens out there, Covid-19 is relatively docile. It is an easily transmissible virus that is far more deadly than the flu, and has mysterious long-term effects. But it doesn’t kill three out of four people it infects, like the Nipah virus. It doesn’t cause people to bleed out of their eyes and rectums like Ebola. “Imagine a disease with seventy-five percent case fatality that is equally transmissible,” says Stephen Luby, an epidemiologist at Stanford University. “That would be an existential threat to human civilization.”
