The most attention-grabbing scare stories about the pandemic often revolve around individual cases — someone who got the disease twice; a young, fit person who died; an older person who was likely infectious for more than two months. The fear is that these phenomena could be widespread, but scientists who study infectious disease say it’s normal to see extreme variability in the human reaction to any virus.
Early in the pandemic, people often described the disease based on their experience or someone they knew. Some said it was just the sniffles because that’s what they experienced. Others said it was worst thing that ever hit them. They’re both right. But the over-generalization of these experiences can feed into the political polarization of the disease. It shouldn’t. In the big picture, Covid-19 neither the Black Death or the sniffles.
