Chapter 21, melancholy muse, is about why the flu didn’t inspire much art though it did create a huge break from past tradition. No major creative of the lost generation really tackled the subject though all were personally affected by it.
If the exact same strain of H1N1 emerged today, she says it would likely be mild.
I wonder how you get to that conclusion. Most people exposed to it are now dead. How are the rest of us immune primed? I still don’t get some basics here. 
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This conclusion and afterword is mostly forgettable speculation in light of Covid. Comments on WHO and CDC that seem charmingly simplistic in 2020. Still some interesting thoughts on using social networks for surveillance etc. Just... obsolete.
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Afterword has interesting insight that pandemic memories take longer to develop and stabilize than other historical memories. 80,000 books on WW1 but only 400 on Spanish Flu. But latter are recent/exponential increase.
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Spanish Flu is finally entering popular memory. 3 characters in Diwnton Abbey got it and 1 died. Black Death wasn’t even called that till the 16th century. It was called the blue death before. First works on it from 19th century.
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That delay effect is over I think. Covid has been live-blogged and tweeted vastly more broadly and deeply than anything in history. I bet there will be a crop of solid books within a decade.
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Alright done. I skimmed the last 5 chapters rather fast because the book was beginning to drag tbh. But it’s overall a very well done heavy lifting that does its global multi-level spiral South African grandmother storytelling shtick well. The diverse anecdotes help a lot.
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Is it because the virus evolves and more deadly variants are less likely to propagate?
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Yes, not an expert, but that's my impression. If a virus kills people too fast the R0 goes down because they stay home and then die. It's better if they feel good enough to continue wandering around for awhile to spread more. Asymptomatic spread is great for viruses.
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Not expert, my understanding is most viruses become less virulent over time, the common circulating colds may have once been more deadly, Covid may become common cold. Also H1N1 did reemerge in 2009/2010, though some worried it would be big, wasn't bad, mostly affected S America.
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Also, my impression after reading Immunology Twitter this year and listening to ~50 hours of TWiV is that we know next to nothing about the immune response as a system and most of our knowledge was gained by throwing darts and some of them stuck.
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