You’re flagrantly rewriting a history where anyone who cares can go back and see what actually happened. Your interjection of malaria was not a call for either empathy or action but was instead intended to shame people for being concerned about covid and, later on, try to score points on the assertion that Americans are uniquely prone to overreaction, or at least in comparison to the far better Brits.
Look, here’s a list of the daily activities the median poster (from the US, UK, or otherwise) on this forum might do that would put themselves and their families at risk of contracting malaria:
And here’s a list of daily activities where they would have a chance of spreading malaria themselves:
And here’s a list of things people here could actually do about malaria:
- Donate money to effective organizations
- Call their elected officials to increase funding for malaria research and prevention.
- Upend their entire ways of life and change careers to work in malaria research and prevention.
It’s pretty damn unreasonable to think that literally everyone in the forum undertake #3, as not everyone has the skills, and a world with malaria still needs truck drivers, scientists working on things other than malaria, lawyers, farmers, paper makers, and all manner of other roles we’ve found ourselves in.
“What should I do about malaria?” is a solved problem for most people, unless they’re considering travel to affected areas, and as such, it’s not going to merit much discussion. Meanwhile, “what should I do about covid?” is really important and was unclear, because it’s all around us, impacting virtually everything we do outside of our homes and many things inside them as well. Making a comparison to malaria is just an absurd means of trying to pat yourself on the back.