The CDC released their latest flu numbers - 1,000 more died March 7 - March 14 - When will you learn?

Yes. Flu kills more people than Coronavirus. Today. We are currently on the same trajectory as Italy for positives and have not taken lockdown measures at the same rate. Italy has a much more robust health system with very good access to hospitals and critical care in rural communities. In the US, we have no spare capacity, a shortage of hospital beds in rural communities and we are already having shortages in PPEs. If we do not take drastic measures, we will quickly surpass Italy and China. Once our health system is overwhelmed, we will see 1000 deaths a day. We are about two weeks away from this. And once our health system is overwhelmed, that will mean that you could die in the hospital if your appendix bursts because doctors are rationing care. And if you do get surgery in time, you may contract Coronavirus due to the lack of PPEs. And then the virus will persist at high rates for months and months if we do not take extreme measures. The Chinese are slowly returning to normal after a relatively brief fight. We do not even have the testing capability to be able to replicate the Chinese and S Korean success.

dunes runner wrote:

NYT reader wrote:

So you think all theses medical doctors and virus experts made that all up?

Yes, and because of that, millions of people have been losing their jobs and their sources of income.

That's what's most frustrating. We could get tired and give up debating those who seem fully invested in calamity. Eventually the truth will be undeniable (by honest people). But millions of people will suffer from the "flattening the curve". Totally unnecessary and very sad.

The flu experience is exactly the point. Every year flu infects between 10 and 40 million Americans. In bad years there are nearly 1 million flu hospitalizations and up to 60,000 flu related deaths. In bad years flu comes close to overwhelming our health care system. Every year at my hospital we go through times when we have to cancel elective surgeries because the hospital is full due to flu related hospitalizations.

Now consider, flu has built in features that contain the spread (flatten the curve). First lots of people are vaccinated against flu including all health care workers. Second there is some community herd immunity due to exposures to past years strains of the virus. Third flu is very seasonal and dies down significantly in the summer. Fourth flu has a relatively low morbidity and mortality rate.

Coronavirus has none of those things. Maybe it’s seasonal - we don’t know. It appears to have a mortality rate that is at least several fold higher than flu and may be up to 20 times higher. When mortality rates are higher then morbidity rates are also higher which means many more people on ventilators and in the ICU. With nothing to naturally flatten the curve, corona could very rapidly disseminate to a much much larger swath of the population. There is nothing to slow it’s spread - no vaccinated people, no heard immunity. We’re all totally naive to this virus and it appears to be 2-4 times as contagious as flu. It could very easily infect 10 times as many people as flu and this could happen in a much shorter time span. That’s why this is a public health crisis. Our only weapon is social distancing or it will totally overwhelm our health care system. Idiots like the op need to stop downplaying this. Our experience with flu shows how easy it is to overwhelm health care resources. Listen to to the experts. There’s a reason we’re tanking the economy over this.

Precious Roy wrote:

We are currently on the same trajectory as Italy for positives and have not taken lockdown measures at the same rate.

Speculation. There is no data to support any claim about how many total infections there are in either Italy or the US.

There is, however, reason to believe there are far more unreported cases in Italy than the US: the "death rate" in Italy at 8.1% vs 1.3% in the US. Unless Italians are really 6 times more susceptible to dying from it than Americans, looks like the differences in our health care systems extend to how data is gathered and compiled. That likely falsifies your statement, and certainly debunks the implied equivalence between our reported caseload and theirs. Half the cases but 1/12 the number of deaths? No, not the same.

Consider cognitive bias. This virus has reached most countries on Earth, many quite some time ago. None has had near the experience of this one country you're obsessing with. Why are you harping on the worst-case?

Its obviously the exponential growth rate. You are unbelievably blind. Even with time Trump finally somewhat got it. Even Trump is ahead of you.https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/03/17/why-exponential-growth-is-so-scary-for-the-covid-19-coronavirus/#5b51e6424e9b

Facts Matter wrote:

The same CDC you you know and love releases their numbers every week. Influenza, the serial killer is chugging along st around 1,000 deaths per week since October 1. On March 7 the number was 22,000, we are now at 23,000. That 1,000 increase is 4 times the total number if deaths from COVID-19 in the USA.

What more evidence do you need that the flu kills more people and will continue to kill more people than COVID-19. Let me guess, when this pandemic turns out to be a big nothing-burger, everyone is going to praise Trump for his actions that saved so many lives. He will take credit for the deaths being so low. People will believe that it was the social distancing instead of the real truth, that COVID-19 is and will never be as deadly as the flu!

You’re the guy who is known for focusin on the .2 death rate in Germany and now you’re using the 1.2 death rate in US to make a point.

You cherry pick your numbers and refuse to admit some of your numbers have been way wrong. If you would do that then some people might have respect for you. But if you keep spouting stuff that some of which is proven wrong and don’t admit it I do wonder if at some point we should as a community let you keep saying stuff? Look we are an open community on letsrun and one of the things we value more than anything is diversity of viewpoints and letting people argue against claims they don’t like but if one individual constabtly changes the goal posts and refuses to admit they are doing it I do question if at some point we say time for a timeout. However I do respect you always post under your name so people can argue with you. Just some humility and an admission some of the things you said are wrong might be a place to start .

Of course the data sets we have right now are all a little different. Different countries have different health care systems doing things different too.

The problem with the Covid 19 is, that it's a new virus which is spreading exponentially right now. Yes the flu is around every year and people die from it. But usually only old and fragile people die from the flu or get violently ill. That is different with Covid 19.

So yea, maybe it's better to do everything possible to keep the spread slow, so that the experts can come up with solutions.

I'd like to put a stop to the flu fear-mongering on this site. In 2017, 55000 Americans died due to influenza and pneumonia. Of the 55k, 38000 died over the age of 75 with 25k dead 85+ and over. The life expectancy in this report is 76 years old. Basically, flu gets attributed to people that are expected to die.

This is why Coronavirus is so novel. These are "new" deaths that did not occur last year with no relief in sight so we don't know the ceiling. Looking at these numbers we could expect deaths in 50k range.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf

self isolate now wrote:

Allen53 wrote:

99% of all of Italy’s recent Covid19-associated deaths could have been caused by pre-existing chronic conditions, according to a report released by the Italian Institute of Health, ISS.

1, I doubt your numbers. 2, tons of Americans have pre-existing chronic conditions (obesity is a risk factor for covid-19). 3, it doesn't matter HOW covid-19 is causing massive hospitalizations and (soon) deaths, what matters is that a ton of preventable deaths will happen because the hospitals will be full.

Those aren't my numbers they are from the Italian Institute of Health. You just blanket doubt them because you don't want to believe it- or will you look it up? The actual; figure was 99.2% of Italian Covid19-related deaths were already sick with something else, and the ISS hasn’t actually determined they died of Covid19 at all. Consider that when paired with the reports that the test kits can produce false positives.

Let me help you:

Here's the report:

Also a report in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera points out that Italian intensive care units already collapsed under the marked flu wave in 2017/2018. They had to postpone operations, call nurses back from holiday and ran out of blood donations.

A new epidemiological study (preprint) concludes that the mortality of Covid19 even in the Chinese city of Wuhan was only 0.04% to 0.12% and thus rather lower than that of seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1%. As a reason for the overestimated mortality of Covid19, the researchers suspect that initially only a small number of cases were recorded in Wuhan, as the disease was probably asymptomatic or mild in many people.

Good research! The Italian National Institute of Health report is important from the perspective of what's going on in Italy. And since so many here are saying "we're going to be another Italy in week or so," well...that could be very true with our high percentage of unhealthy elderly citizens. This shouldn't be "shock & awe" to anyone given the Italian research. Good article on why seniors are so susceptible to COV-19:

In addition, diabetes is major risk factor for serious complications and death from COV-19 for all ages:

This just in on the diabetes issue:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kob.com/articles/diabetics-told-to-be-prepared-as-covid-19-spreads-5679958.html

USA

19624 infected

147 recovered

Percent recovered 0.75%

Percent still infected 99.25%

People who use death rate as the only metric to assess the significance of this virus are among the most ignorant humans on earth.

Bad Wigins wrote:

self isolate now wrote:

Tell me why you expect covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to stop climbing exponentially?

Because that's what already happened in Asia.

Stop panicking and turn your brain back on. Why do you want so desperately for things to be horrible? Are you evil?

And what caused that to happen in Asia?

Exactly the type of social distancing and societal shutdown that you seem to be arguing is an overreaction.

You can't have it both ways

Marksch wrote:

Bad Wigins wrote:

Because that's what already happened in Asia.

Stop panicking and turn your brain back on. Why do you want so desperately for things to be horrible? Are you evil?

And what caused that to happen in Asia?

Exactly the type of social distancing and societal shutdown that you seem to be arguing is an overreaction.

You can't have it both ways

China-shutdown

SK- no shutdown

Japan-no shutdown

Taiwan- no shutdown

HK- no shutdown

Vietnam- no shutdown

Russia- no shutdown

Mongolia- no shutdown

Hand washing. China is back up and running because they learned from their neighbors.

That is great news because that population experiences only mild symptoms unless they have pre-existing conditions. Maybe we can lift the quarantine because the middle aged population continues to be exposed anyway.

party like it's 1859 wrote:

People who use death rate as the only metric to assess the significance of this virus are among the most ignorant humans on earth.

And what rate do you think is near as accurate?