You know what grinds my gears.

So people still talk about COVID, which is fair.

Nobody ever talks about the flu, which can also permanently disable you and kills thousands of people per year. Flu pandemics can be just as vicious as COVID. Not all of the people who get disabled or die are just “old” people either. But “it’s the flu.” So nobody cares.

EBV causes mono and is highly contagious, almost everyone has had it. It has been linked to everything from lupus to MS. But nobody cares.

VZV causes chickenpox and shingles. Chickenpox can kill you in adulthood. Shingles is unbelievably painful and debilitating, sometimes causing lifelong pain. I lost a job I was due to start because of shingles a few years ago. My scalp still feels weird from it. I was “lucky.”

I just don’t understand why we don’t take disease more seriously in general. I feel COVID is a soft target because it is easily diagnosable (the flu doesn’t have widespread testing usually). You can correlate long COVID with it. But ME/CFS from the flu is much harder to pin down, non-specific, and almost invisible, because of the lack of rapid tests for it. But it too rapidly mutates, sometimes with deadly results (think Spanish flu).