Scot, I basically accept your points, albeit with significant caveats. COVID-19 is probably not going to be to capitalism what the Black Death was to feudalism. That is if we hold that the Black Death brought down Feudalism. In other words, COVID-19 looks unlikely to bring down capitalism, on its own. It might or might not modify (neoliberal) capitalism longer term. It certainly makes capitalism even more unviable for the poor and vulnerable. There are historians who argue, with backing research, that the Black Death made the rich richer. If this happens again, if we see COVID-19 directly operating to make the rich richer (and I think there is already data for this conclusion), then in that sense COVID-19 is going to be to capitalism what the Black Death was to feudalism.
As I wrote in my above posts, I would be careful about equating COVID-19 in ANY way to influenza. People naturally look for analogies but the pathogens and diseases are scarcely analogous at all except for the pulmonary infection route and the fact of being RNA viruses. They are not even in the same phylum (of Realm: Riboviria, Kingdom: Orthornavirae). That is a long way back up the classification tree and I argue that that matters. Genetics, epigenetics and phenotype matter. Code and conformation matter. I argue we should be aware of this and expect, albeit not with absolute certainty of course, the SARS-CoV-2 virus to interact very differently with humans than do the Influenza A virus and Influenza B virus, for examples.
It is possible that influenza, of some variety at least, has existed as infecting and transmitting between humans for about 8,000 years. Perhaps we could put a plus or minus of 2,000 years on that. That is a lot of coevolution of humans and influenza viruses. Some examples of coronaviruses, namely some cold coronaviruses have also existed and co-evolved with humans. These may have been around for up to 18,000 years plus or minus several thousand. In classification terms this gets us down three steps to Family: Coronaviridae. This means something for sure but how much it means is still uncertain. Maybe we should look to coronavirus cold behaviour for some indicators but not those already refuted. SARS-CoV-2 is not benign like the cornoavirus cold. But SARS-CoV-2 appears capable of multiple infections within a year in the same person, just like the coronavirus cold, and even against immunisation in a significant number of cases. SARS-CoV-2 appears to be showing a considerably greater ability than does influenza to execute immune escape and vaccine escape and without so much relying on rapid mutation to achieve this as does influenza. SARS-CoV-2 also causes more death and morbidity than standard seasonal flus though perhaps not more than 1 in 100 year flu pandemic mutations.
SARS-CoV-2 is a very different “beast” from the influenza viruses. This suggests we should not automatically expect its progress to be the same as influenza pandemic(s). It could be the same, better or worse than flus over the long term. We just don’t have enough data yet. The other point I made was that this was a novel zoonosis, a pathogen brand new to humans in terms of infecting and being directly transmitted between humans. We have not co-evolved with SARS-CoV-2 except since about November 2019. This matters as this becomes and is a punctuated equilibrium evolution event. The salient point about punctuated equilibrium evolution is that evolution is vastly more rapid than in the long equilibrium periods in between. This is especially the case on the side of a mutating virus rapidly colonising huge numbers of immune-naïve humans numbering in the billions. This rapid evolution event is potentially very dangerous as it does, as the name suggests, carry the real possibility of puncturing an equilibrium; namely the recent and current equilibrium we have lived in, as a modern, industrialised, globalised and over-populated civilization. I don’t think the potential dangers of this can be over-emphasised. Eradication was in order initially. Since we have failed that test, extreme caution and strong suppression (global 95% vaccination, plus treatments and NPIs) are in order. Since we are still failing all of these for at least 2/3 rds of the world population, I can only state again I don’t think the potential dangers of this situation can be over-emphasised.
Global warming is much more clearly an existential threat to our system and even species than is SARS-CoV-2. However, I don’t think that we can rule SARS-CoV-2 out as a possible real threat to our system though not to our species. We will very likely co-evolve and co-exist with SARS-CoV-2 eventually but it could look like co-existence with flu-size epidemics which are more frequent than flu epidemics tend to be. One issue that exercises me is the multiplicative nature of these threats. Dealing with climate change is and will be bad enough; touch and go in fact. Dealing with climate change times SARS-CoV-2 looks even worse. That is a real worry.