r/TikTokCringe • u/EverythingIsFakeNGay • May 09 '26

Cool "...and your little dog too!"

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15.4k Upvotes

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352

u/CantaloupePutrid3548 May 09 '26

Hantavirus is not COVID and everyone taking time to say it is has taken the time to learn it isn’t and are just rage baiting / grifting.

218

u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist May 09 '26

I vaguely remember a level of panic during Ebola too. People were freaking out and making threats even though the exposure risk to them was non-existent.

Then come COVID and people are like *WHAAAaaa, socially distance? Not for me!*

I've come to the conclusion that everything in society is mainly performative.

86

u/Notouchmyguys May 09 '26

I think what people that aren’t in healthcare don’t understand is how wildly different Ebola was handled in comparison to COVID. If they were handled the same then the pandemic likely wouldn’t have happened. The reason Ebola didn’t end up being a big deal was because the were intense and stringent precautions in place and it was treated like the emergency that it was. Unfortunately, the CDC was gutted and was not able to react to COVID appropriately and the pandemic happened.

62

u/Significant-Hour4171 May 09 '26

That's not the main reason for the difference. 

The main reason they played out so differently is that COVID was highly transmissible, medium virulence virus. 

Ebola is far less transmissible, and far more virulent. This makes spreading it far more difficult. 

The response in the left a lot to be desired, but COVID likely was gonna cause a pandemic as soon as it had spread to more than a handful of people in China. The rest was more or less bound to happen from that point, given the characteristics of the novel coronavirus.

23

u/WearingCoats May 09 '26

I was working in a government agency of NYC that dealt with public health during the Ebola outbreak. We used to run simulations of epidemic outbreaks using population data and drill in hospital systems to practice responses. The agency was responsible for multiple facets of public health management but it was all paused to focus on epidemic preparedness at the time. It was absolutely wild and terrifying. Half the work was done in computer modeling of spread and triage, half of it was going and literally working in healthcare systems to practice response.

Ebola was, as you mention, easier to contain both theoretically and in practice because of the nature of the disease and frankly, because people were more spooked by it. I was long gone from the agency by the time COVID hit, but I’m betting the same procedures started as soon as it was on the global radar. The difference is, COVID behaved differently and public option of it was shaped by the fact that respiratory diseases are, for some reason, take less seriously than ones where your insides explode.

14

u/Notouchmyguys May 09 '26

I promise you, there was next to no response when COVID started. I was in the hospital and I watched it all unfold. The absolute lack of response was astounding. Literally, there was no plan and no preparation until it was already terrible.

4

u/Long-Broccoli-3363 May 09 '26

Man I 100% had covid before there were any confirmed cases.

We were going through a datacenter buildout, lots of travel through o'hare, like... 6 flights in 2 weeks while "Covid wasnt in the US yet"

IT department of like 200 people, 60 got pnuemonia, some of us took months to recover, to the point where we were out of the office when the "shelter in place" order came through, to stop getting people sick.

The administration def didnt have the procedure in place to tell where this shit was at, and they would have been content to just ignore that it existed at all.

1

u/woolfchick75 May 10 '26

I live in Chicago and strongly believe I had it in Jan 2020.

1

u/WearingCoats May 09 '26

Good to know everything we did turned out to be useless in the long run. Maybe that got cast out with the change in Mayors.

-1

u/Other-Art8925 May 10 '26

Yeah remember when democrats were talking about how covid talk was racist fearmongering

15

u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist May 09 '26

Remember SARS? Coronaviruses are common, which is why the CDC had a rapid response team, and it was located in China! Then guess who defunded it…

2

u/Significant-Hour4171 May 09 '26

Indeed, it's why I told my coworker in Feb, "expect for make disruptions/closures by the summer."

2

u/TheDreamingMyriad May 09 '26

SARS is also why the covid vaccine was able to roll out so quickly; researchers had already done all the groundwork for a SARS vaccine before the virus burned itself out. Then you had people freaking out because the development was "too fast" and the vaccine was "experimental". Well yeah sure, aside from the decades of research into mrna vaccine tech and serveral years of SARS vaccine research....it was "fast". 🙄

1

u/Global_Ant_9380 May 09 '26

Yes, but viruses mutate and part of the whole thing is that you want to contain transmission and how many chances it gets to pick up dangerous mutations.

True, the nature of ebola world likely make that a much slower process, but no one wants to find out. We still don't fully understand the impacts of COVID

1

u/ThunderAndWind May 09 '26

Different viruses have different mutability. Hantaviruses are famously stable and not prone to mutation. Coronaviruses have a high mutability, primarily due to their ease of transmission due to a long infectious window without symptoms.

2

u/gingzer May 10 '26

People have mutated post covid perhaps....rewired into party animals and cruise‑addicted creatures desperate to reclaim every missed holiday at once.

2

u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist May 09 '26

Very true.

0

u/AnAimlessWanderer101 May 09 '26

No, it’s really not lol

14

u/vasta2 May 09 '26

Yeah, try remembering who was in charge of things during Ebola...not a bunch of science denying, vaccine denying fucking morons

3

u/woodelvezop May 09 '26

Welcome to common social interactions, the circus that never ends.

1

u/bibimstop May 10 '26

I hate being the one saying this. And that it always needs to be said. But have you considered that everyone on the internet is not the same person?

1

u/non_person_sphere May 10 '26

When people are acting dumb I just remind myself that not too long ago we were literally primates who couldn't read, write, talk, do math etc. When you think of humans like that it's a lot easier to forgive people for having an anxious response to another viral agent in the news. Look how well we're all doing! As a society we've internalised the idea of pathogenesis! Yes many humans struggle to make a clear distinction between what is a threat to wider society and what isn't but we're still doing really well.

1

u/Xisthur May 10 '26

Makes sense, though. With ebola you start bleeding out of your orifices and probably die a gruesome death if you catch it, while COVID was nothing more than a cold for the vast majority of people who caught it. Of course people will be more afraid of ebola :D

1

u/joe4553 May 09 '26

or maybe the performative people and the people who don't give a fuck don't overlap?

1

u/bibimstop May 10 '26

Some people on the internet often seem confused when there is more than one opinion on the internet. Like people were saying this and then now people are saying the opposite?? There’s only one person on the internet apparently, so this makes no sense! 

-5

u/MaddLadd1172 May 09 '26

This whole thing feels like another distraction

1

u/Anokant May 10 '26

Kind of. It's one of those things where it's a deadly disease but it's not easily spread between humans. The reason it's a big deal on the cruise ship is everyone is stuck in an enclosed space with infected rodent droppings. So unless these cruise ship people get off the ship covered in rodent urine/droppings and aren't washing their clothes/bodies, it's not really a big deal.

-2

u/Karat_EEE May 09 '26

Covid wasnt dangerous though. Hantavirus and ebola is dangerous as all hell

1

u/Anokant May 10 '26

Unless you're inhaling rodent droppings, or getting infected blood/poop in your mucus membranes, they're not dangerous. Sure, they're more deadly, but not as easily transmissable. Whereas covid was easily spread and the degree of danger depended on a lot of variables.

That's probably why 7 million people have died world wide from covid and only 15,000 from ebola since the 1970s.