And those meals are sure getting expensive these days....there is one important lesson every world leader should take heed from the Romans, never stop the bread and circuses or make them impossible to afford. You need to keep the normies entertained with Netflix and cheeseburgers.
While the New Deal was mostly garbage and fucked over America in the long run, one of the driving reasons it was passed was because of fears that with Americans still suffering from the heavy effects of the Great Depression that it could push them into arms of Communists because bread and circuses were very hard to afford when money had almost been rendered worthless.
On the Corona stuff yes, that's literally what the flu does every year, it's why they cook up a new flu vaccine yearly for people to take if they so choose. This virus is completely dwarfed by the Black Death and Spanish Flu, the Spanish Flu in particular was extremely nasty because it killed a lot of young people which was very unusual, my great-great grandfather lost his young 19-20 year old wife to the Spanish Flu just 5-6 months after she gave birth to their daughter.
I think two reasons the media hyped the virus up so greatly were 1: Orange Man, they had to help create a massive crisis for Orange Man in the hopes that it would stifle his presidency and hopefully get him out of office. 2: China, when we suddenly got a deluge of videos of people dropping on the streets and walking around looking very ill and sick and the images of the Chinese government welding people inside their homes; China helped hype the virus up as something much worse and much deadlier.