@Bobbelieu There's a missing piece of information that, unfortunately, Mr. King does not seem to have been aware of.
The problem with COVID-19 is not the acute illness - that is indeed eminently survivable.
The problem with COVID-19 is its long-term impacts on one's vital organs, immune system, and vasculature; it causes multiple organ damage, compromises the immune system (in large part via its deleterious effects on the naive T cell population), and causes vascular damage + microclotting.
@IrelandTorin This is true but I think that what he was getting at was that Captain Tripps wiped out most of the population. We lost an incredible number of people to COVID but the US wasn't depopulated like in The Stand. COVID was very bad, but the virus in The Stand was far worse
@Bobbelieu Simply put, our failure to respond to the COVID pandemic has vastly increased the risk of another pandemic occurring relatively soon, and it has also significantly reduced the chances of success of any future efforts to suppress spread of pandemic pathogens (both biologically and sociologically).
That means something akin to the catastrophe described in the book is now much more likely to actually happen.
@Bobbelieu COVID wasn't directly as bad as the virus described in the book.
But that doesn't mean it won't necessarily *lead to* horrific catastrophes.
The nasty thing about having an immunocompromised population is that it essentially turns that entire population into an incubator for new diseases & variants of existing diseases - increased spread increases the total number of mutations, allowing for rapid evolution of new traits (from infectivity & immune evasion to worse toxins & more).