re: #55 Belafon

I wonder if the reason the black plague and the 1918 flu were so deadly was because of the variants. You might catch one version and not feel too much from it, but then the next wave comes through, which your body isn’t fully prepared for and down you go.

Can’t speak for the 1918 flu, but yersinia pestis is a bacterium, not a virus, and I haven’t heard that it has changed significantly since we first encountered it. The main reason the epidemics of the 1350’s were so deadly was that the population was about the maximum that the economy (at 1350 tech levels) could support. A lot of people were borderline malnourished and they died quickly.