Who can explain?

[vnman]

Count me in for my summer vacation!

Do people in Mexico wear masks?

I never read your question, Christian. But people did wear masks inside, but not in clubs.

Not sure if Mexico City would be your cup of tea. I know you're not a party mouse and there is no massage scene you would be interested in. It is mostly macho guys. But that is only from a boy's perspective. Culturally it is a great country. Who knows, you might discover a whole other side of Gay Mexico that I don't know.

And there is always Grindr.

[Dragonman]

I follow news about Covid only loosely, but I once somewhere [citation needed] saw a graph that showed mortality over years, where the annual flue was a light bump, and Covid was a slightly bigger bump.

50 years ago, without current analytical methods, Covid would have gone unnoticed by the general population. Only statisticians would have noticed that there is an increased mortality above natural fluctuations.

"50 years ago" would have been in the 1970s. Influenza vaccines were developed in the 1940s, when influenza was already known. Covid-19 vaccines were developed after the beginning of the pandemic. So the comparison is flawed.

The BMJ has an interesting report - "Covid and flu: what do the numbers tell us about morbidity and deaths? (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2514) - pointing out that reported deaths from influenza often include deaths from pneumonia, so the figures for influenza deaths are usually under-reporting actual ones. The report includes the comment: "In the UK the Health Foundation has articulated the difference in impact between flu and covid in terms of life years. “In a bad flu year on average around 30 000 people in the UK die from flu and pneumonia, with a loss of around 250 000 life years. This is a sixth of the life years lost to covid-19,” it noted."

Demographers estimate the global population in 1918 at about 1.8 billion persons. The 1918 "Spanish Flu" or H1N1 pandemic killed somewhere around 50 million people worldwide. These figures suggest that about 30% of the world’s population was infected during that pandemic and that it killed about 2.7% of that population (https://www.marshallindependent.com/...-then-and-now/). People noticed.

An interesting phenomenon of the Covid-19 pandemic is that the annual death rate influenza has declined - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...rticle/2783644.