It's done at state level, by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources for one, so it is possible that federal government damage has not affected it.

Wouldn’t the end up floating into the air?

It’s pretty easy to get close to prairie dogs over time. They will eventually learn you’re not a threat, and tell the others.

So you’re going on a walk one day, they seem friendly, people like handling cute animals… bada big bada boom

Who was advocating for leaving your nose out? We used to make fun of the morons we saw doing that.

Frankly, I’m sad masks aren’t still more of a thing. I don’t want to wear one all the time, but if you’re sick and need to be in a public place, throw one on out of consideration for your peers.

In some ways - particularly health and food security - definitely.

Although I wonder if loneliness, stress and lack of direction are much bigger problems today.

And yet Americans have never been angrier.

Eventhoug JFK Jr

And we know this. We can measure it and reason about it. But good times breeds weak people and we’re well into the phase of people no-longer grokking why vaccines, civil government, democracy, floodplain management, etc. need to exist.

This social plague is proliferating and I’m not sure we really know how to fight it as it takes colleagues, friends, family, celebrities we once admired.

Try Michael Crichtons "The hot zone".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone

There's entire chapters of this:

"The author describes the progression of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the final stage in which Monet's internal organs fail and he hemorrhages extensively in a waiting room in a Nairobi hospital. "

Edit: Richard Preston, not Michael Chrichton. Not sure what I was thinking.

Now that was a wonderful compliment. Thank you.

Recommendation: The Doomsday Book. Connie Willis. Heartbreaking.

I can imagine, though in the context you describe, the entire terrifying process would have been much slower-moving. Months maybe? I'm honestly curious.

Exactly that too. Coupled with them living in almost complete darkness about how or why diseases spread, it would have been exceptionally terrifying to behold in a way that a modern person in the middle of a pandemic wouldn't have to face in quite the same way.

The IFR (infection fatality rate: the chance of dying for an individual who contracted COVID) is under 1%.

That’s a small minority by any reasonable measure, especially in a thread comparing it to the plague.

"Sure, it wasn't 80%, but still, it's not that isolated and I hate this narrative that it was a light cold."

All of my friends, extended family and friends of friends got Covid. Nobody died. The only people that died had pre-existing conditions.

To the vast majority of the population, it was similar to a bad cold.

I know a couple in Missouri who lost 5 family members between his and her side. All obese. I believe 4 of them died after the vaccine was available, but they refused to take it.

Compared to the plague? Absolutely, it definitely was. As a society it’s a sign of how far we’ve come that we have eliminated that kind of illness.

I mean I know dozens of people who caught it and nobody died. Anecdotes don’t mean much.

I'm sorry but you're way off base, or deliberately reacting to information that you perceive as having a political agenda that it actually doesn't have.

How I value my friends has nothing to do with the death toll and mortality rate I saw anecdotally, of nearly nobody I know dying from it out of hundreds of people of many ages that I knew at the time. Do you imagine that me valuing my friendships more or less somehow changes the clinical mortality stats for a carefully monitored virus? Really?

Also, COVID wasn't a light cold, but for many people, the vast majority in fact, its symptoms were moderate to mild and far from fatal. Again, this isn't politics of any kind talking, it's just the raw numbers from any reliable source you care to look at. IFR wasn't anywhere close to 10% by the way, as you say further down. Most people, by far, with COVID, were never hospitalized for it (that would have been impossible considering what percentage of the population eventually got it) and the IFR rate among them wasn't 10%. I'd truly love to see your source for that whopper.

Globally, in absolute averaged total, as far as any source I've seen indicates, COVID had/has an IFR that roughly breaks down as follows: This is from the National Institute of Health btw.

"For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups."

In any case, all of this deviates slightly from a more basic point there's simply no comparison between COVID and the Black Death, in no scenario or circumstance, and mentioning that is not denying that COVID could be dangerous. It's just a statement of obvious facts about how much, much more horrific one of those two pandemics was historically.

This is a solid short story prompt.

Cue the Fall Out Boy track...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onzL0EM1pKY

You might enjoy the movie Pontypool. I describe it as a zombie movie about linguistics.

Mumps, a common kid's viral disease, has overlapping symptoms, so many people might follow a "let's wait and see" approach.

Also, medical practitioners may not immediately put on their bioharzard protection suite when someone walks in with swollen lymph nodes and nausea.

That's why it is important to take news of incidents and location of the occurrence into consideration, both as a patient and as medical staff.

No, I’m agreeing that it’s not about domestic policies. That’s my point. OP tried to bring domestic cuts to Medicaid into the issue to make it sound like the measles cases in the U.S. have something to do with that domestic policy.