According to Statista.com, there have been 4,592 deaths from Covid-19 worldwide as of March 12.
According to the CDC, between Oct. 1, 2019 and February 29, 2020, between 22,000 and 53,000 died of the flu in this country.
According to Medicine.Net the flu kills between 291,000 and 646,000 annually worldwide.
These numbers do not seem to me to warrant the scare headlines and extreme measures being taken regarding Covid-19.
Am I missing something? If so, what?
I am old enough to remember when public swimming pools were shut during the years before the polio vaccine came along.
If car accidents killed 20 people in the US in January, then 400 in February, one might become nervous waiting on the March numbers. We are dealing with a new virus that we don't know much about, but which has shown that it can spread rapidly and kill a lot of people. The flu we have seen before, and understand.
ReplyDeleteWell, in 2018 there were 36,560 auto fatalities in the U.S., which comes to 3,046 per month, considerably more than 40. And if we don't know much about the Covid-19 virus, why are we taking far greater precautions than we do about viruses we know much more about?
ReplyDeleteIf you will look again at my comment, it had to do with the rate of increase. Squaring a February 400--which let me say up front is a number pulled from the air and not reflecting anything in the real world--gets one to a March 160 thousand, almost five times the number of 2018 auto fatalities. As for the virus, we have learned over the last forty or so years how to create vaccines for the flu. They are very far from being perfectly effective, but they are effective enough to create "herd immunity" so that the flu never gets too bad. From what I read, it will be a while before we figure out a vaccine for Covid 19.
DeleteAmong people who get sick from this virus, the mortality rate is an average of ten times higher than the flu, higher still among the elderly and people with decreased lung capacity or weakened immune systems, and it's easily transmitted by people who show no symptoms. We also don't have the hospital capacity to handle the sort of spread they've seen in places like Italy, where patients are dying for lack of respirators. If our health-care system cracks under the strain of trying to treat coronavirus patients, good luck if you need any other form of care for weeks or even months.
ReplyDeleteBut there is no indication that the rate of Covid-19 infection is increasing to that degree. As for the flu vaccine, the flu virus mutates so quickly that the vaccine is often out of date by the time it hits the market. I still do not see that the actual numbers warrant the panic. Nor do I see how the actual numbers warrant the predictions. The fact is, it hasn't killed nearly as many people as the flu just actually did.
ReplyDeleteHi Jeff,
ReplyDeleteAccording to ourworldindata.org, regarding the mortality rate of Covid-19, “We … cannot give a definitive figure for the mortality risk of the disease.”
Italy went from two cases in the last week of January to nearly 25,000 cases six weeks later, with a mortality rate of 7 percent. Give us a couple weeks of promiscuous mingling-about and we could be there too, although learning from Italy's mistakes (among other factors unique to the U.S.) may be why our mortality rate is currently 1.7 percent. I don't know anyone who's responding with "panic"; I'm sure not. I live in a rural area where I'm far less likely to come into contact with this thing than someone in a city or dense suburb. But based on everything I've read from infectious disease experts, these closings and informal social quarantines should drastically slow the spread.
ReplyDeleteYes, no toilet paper at Rite-Aid. Or Amazon. Italy has a dubious health care system. If you read the British papers, as I do, you would know that their NHS has some problems, too. The mathematics of this just doesn't add up. Will we shut down next flu season also? Between 22,000 and 53,00o died during the last one — in this country. Mostly old folks like me, or people with other health problems.
ReplyDelete