[QUOTE=Uncwilly;542931]And it is not listed here, where they still list smallpox (extinct), and MERS, and SARS (which are basically gone).
[URL]https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/en/[/URL][/QUOTE]Smallpox is eradicated, but not yet extinct, since the Russians and apparently the US are still holding samples. A test of some American samples before they were destroyed showed stored samples could be viable for ~60 years or more.
There is also the possibility that it could be recreated in a lab.
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debate[/url]
[url]https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/CDCracingsmallpoxgenome.html[/url]

In the plethora of online references about pandemics, [url=https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/200/7/1018/903237]this one[/url] got my attention because of one of the author's names, which I have emphasized in the biblio:

What Is a Pandemic?
David M. Morens, Gregory K. Folkers, [b]Anthony S. Fauci[/b]
The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 200, Issue 7, 1 October 2009, Pages 1018–1021, [url]https://doi.org/10.1086/644537[/url]
Published: 01 October 2009

The article gives eight features of pandemics:

Wide geographic extension, Disease movement, High attack rates and explosiveness, Minimal population immunity, Novelty, Infectiousness, Contagiousness, and Severity

HIV/AIDS is listed under three of these: Wide geographic extension, Novelty (at the time of its emergence in the 1980's), and Severity.

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;542911]Please read a dictionary and don't trust your gut on pandemic vs. epidemic.[/QUOTE]

You want me to read a dictionary? Alrighty then!

My old Merriam-Webster unabridged defines an [i]epidemic[/i] as [quote]A rapidly spreading or widely prevalent attack of disease.[/quote] It defines the [i]adjective[/i] "pandemic" as [quote]Of or pertaining to all the people; vulgar; general; universal; specif., [i]Med[/i]., affecting the majority of people in a country or a number of countries; everywhere epidemic.[/quote]It then defines the [i]noun[/i] pandemic as "A pandemic disease."

I'm not sure even COVID-19 would qualify as affecting a [i]majority[/i] of people in any country, but it is certainly epidemic in many places at once, so close enough to "everywhere epidemic."

WHO categorizes HIV/AIDS as a "global epidemic." This seems to fit nicely with the description "everywhere epidemic" in the above dictionary definition of [i]pandemic[/i].

However, HIV/AIDS may no longer be as rapidly spreading in many areas as the term [i]epidemic[/i] usually connotes. It would seem to qualify, however, as "widely prevalent."

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;542898]There are two main factors involved with the spread of the virus:[LIST=1][*]How dense the population is.[*]How dense the population is.[/LIST][/QUOTE]

There is the population density, and the density of the skulls in the population. From what I see around me, the latter is quite dominant.

I see many people wearing masks. There appears to be a misconception. I believe they feel protected from COVID-19 if they wear them. Only an N95 rated mask can do that, supposedly. My sister works at the local hospital and must wear one on each of her 12-hour shifts. From what I gather, they are very tight-fitting making them uncomfortable to wear.

I have read articles in the past few weeks which indicate this virus may have gotten here as early as late November of 2019, in a slightly different form. I picked up a really nasty bug back in January. I had a low-grade fever for two weeks and coughed so much that I felt I had pulled every muscle in my abdomen. I feared I would actually crack a rib. They were extremely sore. After two doctor visits and two rounds of different antibiotics, I began to feel better. The recovery has been slow, and continues, even now. I am 64 and I am sure this plays a role.

Did I have COVID-19, or a close variant? Perhaps. The antibiotics would not have done anything for it, but it would have takes care of the other problems. This may have allowed me to recover on my own. All I really know is that I [U]do not[/U] want to catch it again.

Regarding your January experience, did you have head or body aches? Crazy-making headaches are frequently reported.
EDIT: From the front page of the Guardian:
[QUOTE]Andrew Cuomo criticized Trump after the president lashed out against the New York governor in a tweet. In response to Trump’s suggestion that Cuomo should “spend more time ‘doing’ and less time ‘complaining,’” the governor said, “If he’s sitting home watching TV, maybe he should get up and go to work.” Cuomo went on to offer some of his harshest criticism of Trump since the start of the current crisis.

Cuomo’s comments represented some of his harshest criticism of Trump since the start of the crisis. The Democratic governor has generally tried to avoid getting involved in fights with Trump to protect New York’s relationship with the federal government, but Cuomo said the president was asking to be thanked for merely doing his job. “This was your role as president,” Cuomo said.

Cuomo demanded more funding for states, as governors have received the bulk of responsibility for reopening. The governor said the federal government could not expect states to take on so many duties without giving them additional funding. “That is passing the buck without passing the bucks,” Cuomo said.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=kriesel;542952]Smallpox is eradicated, but not yet extinct, since the Russians and apparently the US are still holding samples. A test of some American samples before they were destroyed showed stored samples could be viable for ~60 years or more.
There is also the possibility that it could be recreated in a lab.[/QUOTE]Not a possibility so much as a certainty. The complete genome is on file.

[QUOTE=storm5510;542954]<snip>
I picked up a really nasty bug back in January. I had a low-grade fever for two weeks and coughed so much that I felt I had pulled every muscle in my abdomen. I feared I would actually crack a rib. They were extremely sore. After two doctor visits and two rounds of different antibiotics, I began to feel better. The recovery has been slow, and continues, even now. I am 64 and I am sure this plays a role.

Did I have COVID-19, or a close variant? Perhaps. The antibiotics would not have done anything for it, but it would have takes care of the other problems. This may have allowed me to recover on my own. All I really know is that I [U]do not[/U] want to catch it again.[/QUOTE]
I had a nasty cold this past winter, that began Christmas Eve with a sore throat. By Christmas Morning the sore throat had been joined by other symptoms: upper-respiratory congestion, runny nose, slight body aches, greatly impaired sense of taste, and the headachy, head-stuffed-with-wet-feathers, mentally zombified sensations I associate with having a low-grade fever.

My sense of taste was pretty much gone, but I could still experience the burn of my favorite hot sauce. (It's not nearly as hot as some, but at well over 11,000 Scoville units, it's hot enough to get most folks' attention. I've had colds that killed my sense of taste so dead, even a goodly dollop of that stuff didn't cause any sensation in my mouth or throat.)

Mucus dripping down my throat added a tickling sensation to the soreness, provoking some dry coughing. I fought back with highly mentholated cough drops, which I always keep on hand. They killed off the throat tickling well enough that I was able to sleep.

One night I experienced the unpleasant sensation of having one of my nostrils swell shut. After some time it would re-open, whereupon the [i]other[/i] nostril would swell shut. That grew old real quick. It also interfered with sleeping. At least I was glad my nostrils didn't [i]both[/i] swell shut at the same time!

Christmas dinner went out the window. My symptoms gradually abated over a week and a half or so -- a bit longer than the usual run of a week or less for colds. I was generally lacking in pep for quite some time after that. I was pretty much back to normal by Super Bowl Sunday.

Whatever it was, I know a [i]lot[/i] of people in my area had it around the same time. At least one of them had that persistent chest-racking dry cough, so couldn't sleep, and just wasn't recovering like most folks were. Finally, a pharmacist recommended an OTC long-acting cough suppressant, and that did the trick. It silenced the cough, allowing sleep, and recovery soon followed.

Sorry, I'm not buying the various "I had a nasty ___ last Nov/Dec and now I'm sure it was Covid-19" anecdotes. There were several nasty seasonal-flu strains that began circulating last Fall, and given the known high infectivity of the Covid-19-causing virus and attendant lethality in especially vulnerable subgoups (e.g. nursing-home patients), had the virus reached the US before February, there would have been mass outbreaks. Hello? NYC hospitals over the past month, anyone? So, please - before peddling "there's a reason they're called 'flu-like symptoms'" anecdotes and claiming Covid-19 - show us a reliable antibody test, either from you or the elderly relatives you infected and whse deaths you caused, confirming the claim. You think no one's ever been "sick and feeling like death" due to seasonal flu or any of the other cold-and-flu-season-typical bugs?

[QUOTE=ewmayer;542981]Sorry, I'm not buying the various "I had a nasty ___ last Nov/Dec and now I'm sure it was Covid-19" anecdotes. [.......]
You think no one's ever been "sick and feeling like death" due to seasonal flu or any of the other cold-and-flu-season-typical bugs?[/QUOTE]

This. :tu:
I've had a few otherwise-intelligent friends claim the same thing. Seems the human-nature "I was there first" brag draws stronger than actual evidence. Some of those very-same people that railed on folks for calling Covid "just a really bad flu, stop panicking" are now making the connection that a really bad flu must have been Covid.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;542981]Sorry, I'm not buying the various "I had a nasty ___ last Nov/Dec and now I'm sure it was Covid-19" anecdotes.
<snip>
You think no one's ever been "sick and feeling like death" due to seasonal flu or any of the other cold-and-flu-season-typical bugs?[/QUOTE]

Just to be clear: I don't think what I had was COVID-19. Like I said, whatever it was, a [i]lot[/i] of people in my area had it. It was just whatever was "going around" at the time. Nowhere near as serious as the flu.

I've had the flu more than once. The worst by far was the Hong Kong flu (late 1968). Fever of 102, terrible headache, body aches, barely able to totter across the hall to pee, in the twilight zone when I was supposedly conscious.

I've had run-of-the-mill seasonal flu a couple of times since then. Both times I developed laryngitis and could barely speak. One time it was followed by green-phegm bronchitis that had me on antibiotics. Both times it was way worse than whatever I had this past winter, but much less bad than the Hong Kong flu.

I've gotten my flu shot every year for a number of years. Haven't had the flu since. The first couple of times I had a very minor reaction, felt like I was coming down with a slight cold, cleared up within a day. Compared to getting the flu, insignificant.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;542953]What Is a Pandemic?
David M. Morens, Gregory K. Folkers, [b]Anthony S. Fauci[/b]
The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 200, Issue 7, 1 October 2009, Pages 1018–1021, [url]https://doi.org/10.1086/644537[/url]
Published: 01 October 2009

The article gives eight features of pandemics:

Wide geographic extension, Disease movement, High attack rates and explosiveness, Minimal population immunity, Novelty, Infectiousness, Contagiousness, and Severity
[/QUOTE]
High attack rates and explosiveness.
That is where AIDS fails.
In the USA it took 4 years to go from basically 0 cases to 10,000 cases. COVID-19 did that in less than 2 months. Jan 22-March 18. It peaked ~11 years later at about 65,000 ([URL="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-acquired-immunodeficiency-syndrome-AIDS-cases-by-major-transmission-category_fig1_281611405"]source[/URL]), COVID did that in 2 months and 3 days (CDC [URL="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html"]source[/URL]) .

The USA government's own site about HIV calls it an epidemic:
[url]https://www.hiv.gov/federal-response/ending-the-hiv-epidemic/overview[/url]

Population sampling in Santa Clara County California indicates prevalence far higher than confirmed cases would indicate; 50-85 TIMES. [URL]https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1[/URL]