Originally posted by monochrome If you are reducing the flu mortality rate for the quality of US healthcare you must also reduce COVID-9 mortality rate by the same amount, so the US should be between 10-20x higher mortality than the usual flu.
It is NOT 200x. You are spreading FUD, as usual.
200,000 are hospitalized with the flu annually here, so 2,000,000 potential over the next several months for 30 days each (and we’re at the end of the usual flu season). Potentially 360,000 deaths from related complications.
We have 1,000,000 hospital beds in the US.
You do realize that the numbers you are quoting
are cause for concern, right?
You do realize that 2 million potential cases
for a single disease are enough to wreck utter havoc on hospitals, right? COVID-19 is showing more contagion potential than the flu so the models are going to be very weird - in particular with 20 days of incubation period. Look at Italy, it went from "nothing happened" to hundreds of cases because of a handful of people who were walking around.
Regarding available beds, people cannot be magically teleported to a hospital with empty beds. One outbreak in an underserved area can be a very serious issue. The moment a hospital gets overwhelmed mortality rate increases because quality of care cannot keep up. Nevermind the fact that in the US self-quarantine will not work for reasons that will not be discussed here.
While I agree with you that biz's posts
are too gloomy and there is no apocalypse coming, reckless optimism is almost as bad.