It didn't. I posted this before: the 2019-2020 flu and cold season still had an estimated 20K-60K flu deaths.
Coronavirus IS a cold virus. This never stopped being true.
The Chinese Virus was engineered to be slightly deadlier which is why it started killing people and spreading faster. A very slight increase in lethality and R0 can cause a pandemic like this. Hence the gain of function research.
Thanks for the info. I posted this more out of my observation that anyone who gets the "flu" now automatically assumes it's covid even if they haven't been tested.
(post is archived)