One thing you’re missing in this model is that they’d be selection pressure on humans to develop stronger natural immunity or ability to live with these pathogens.
It’s also a weird counterfactual since it’s plausible that technology enables infectious diseases (due to human density and connectivity) in the way that we experience them. It seems that pandemics may have been especially bad ~19th century when the world was quite connected but there was no modern medicine (germ theory, antibiotics, etc.).
That is true! Maybe the disease burden increases when new pathogens are introduced but eventually reaches a balance.
But it doesn’t seem to completely remove the effect from accumulating multiple pathogens in the community, a population with covid+flu (or any other combination of pathogens with no cross-immunity) in circulation and adapted to live with them will probably still have a higher disease burden than a population with just the flu in circulation and adapted with them.
Quite likely that the 19th century was worse than before due to increased population density and global connectivity, and I shudder to imagine what if AIDS became established in humans in the 19th century instead of the 20th.
One thing you’re missing in this model is that they’d be selection pressure on humans to develop stronger natural immunity or ability to live with these pathogens.
It’s also a weird counterfactual since it’s plausible that technology enables infectious diseases (due to human density and connectivity) in the way that we experience them. It seems that pandemics may have been especially bad ~19th century when the world was quite connected but there was no modern medicine (germ theory, antibiotics, etc.).
That is true! Maybe the disease burden increases when new pathogens are introduced but eventually reaches a balance.
But it doesn’t seem to completely remove the effect from accumulating multiple pathogens in the community, a population with covid+flu (or any other combination of pathogens with no cross-immunity) in circulation and adapted to live with them will probably still have a higher disease burden than a population with just the flu in circulation and adapted with them.
Quite likely that the 19th century was worse than before due to increased population density and global connectivity, and I shudder to imagine what if AIDS became established in humans in the 19th century instead of the 20th.