As I read this piece at Science Magazine by Ann Gibbons on the zoonotic origins of rubella, “German measles”, I was reminded that as a child I contracted chicken pox, measles, mumps, rubella, a couple of other diseases and I had recurrent strep throat and earaches. IIRC in all cases I was treated with antibiotics which in all likelihood did nothing for any of the underlying diseases but may have prevented opportunistic infections. I also had friends and acquaintances who had recovered from polio.
Those were the good old days.
Those are life experiences which I suspect are common to many people under about 60 years of age but not one shared with younger people. I wonder if that is reflected in age-related differences in attitudes about SARS-CoV-2.
I had the fun experience of getting chickenpox as a small infant while still suffering from mumps. My mother said I was one unhappy baby. Also got measles around the same time. Don’t recall getting rubella. Every time we moved (was an air force brat) I would get deathly ill. I attribute my relative freedom from infectious diseases since then to my father being stationed in Japan and Italy and a love of travel which likely exposed me and my siblings to a diverse number of diseases. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a COVID infection when I lived in Japan.
I was young enough to receive the polio vaccine. My wife who is somewhat older than me had a school friend who got it and recovered but was never fully 100% afterwards.
I think many millennials have an outsized terror of Kung Flu because they are too young to remember the existential threat of AIDS or any other ‘life-threatening’ disease. Rarity of events tends to result in morbid fear of them (see over-reporting of child abductions and plane crashes). Their hysterical fear of COVID-19 is often such that they equate positive tests with certain agonizing death.