Originally posted by Sandy Hancock No. It isn't. It is another RNA virus, but from a completely different family from influenza.
It's way too early to make that call. We've learned to live with influenza. It's cyclical, and much less infectious and much less virulent than CoViD-19.
I'd give the USA about two weeks and we can revisit your misguided opinion.
The plague (a bacterial infection, not a virus) would have been a non-event in the antibiotic era. That argument is nonsense.
Exactly. Yersinia is a bacteria and is treatable with existing treatments. This is viral and most of the time if you see a doctor with a virus they say something like, "It's viral. Just hang in there and in a few days you'll feel better." Even the antiviral agents for influenza -- Tamiflu and the others -- only shorten the duration of symptoms about 24 hours. But we don't have treatments that target Coronaviruses.
The whole issue, as you say, is that this is a novel infection for humans. Some of our immune systems will be able to handle it, but some not so well.
As far as the whole "pre-existing condition" thing that has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread, it seems as though if you take medicine for about anything people are saying that you have a preexisting condition and are therefore a higher risk to this illness. But that means a huge number of folks are in the "high-risk" camp -- more than we would normally say for an influenza out break. I certainly don't think of hypertension as a risk factor for get a bad case of influenza, but here, it seemingly is.
---------- Post added 03-21-20 at 06:40 AM ----------
For some reason, I keep thinking of W B Yeats poem The Second Coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?