...The WHO estimates that the flu annually kills between 300,000 and 600,000 souls.
Keep in mind that a flu season is 13-16 weeks. The 2018 flu epidemic in the US was the worst in a decade- 34,200 died. About 490,600 ended up in the hospital.
With COVID-19, we've had about 30,000 people die
in 4 weeks.
We're still in the process of revising the death count upward because we missed quite a few deaths- take a look at today's stats above for NYC deaths - confirmed 7,563
plus suspected 3,914 - which is an indicator that we might see a final count of 40,000+ deaths once the numbers are revised.
Assuming that the actual infection rate is at least 15% (see the reference to pregnant women in this thread's linked article), then the US has at least 50 million cases already, so the deaths are far below 1 in 1000. We should take some comfort in that when compared to the estimated 10% fatality rate in the 1918 pandemic.
That 15% is from a NYC sampling where we know we have a worst case scenario because of the dependence upon mass transit and the density of the population.
The epidemiologists are expecting to see something like 5% of the population that will get infected nationwide. That's 16 million people. If you assume a 4% mortality, that's 660,000 dead. If you assume that 15% of the infected will end up in a hospital, that's 2.5 millions people. If you assume that 5% will require a ventilator, that's 825,000 people.
We don't have a vaccine yet for this, though. Without social distancing and stay at home restrictions, it would be a lot worse. For 15-20% of victims, the virus causes severe or critical breathing difficulties. Organ damage is even being seen in people recovered. When it hits hard, it is nastier than the flu. Don't be a Dr. Phil or William Bennett, either.
A few of my healthcare associates have gotten sick. Their experience varied from a mild cold that lasted 7-10 days to several who had a severe flu-like experience that took 4-6 weeks to get through. One colleague spent 3 days in the ICU. When you extrapolate that to a population of 16 million people who could get sick with this in the US, that's a lot of lost productivity.
We're really in a difficult situation. In epidemiology, they always try to get in early with prevention by preventing people from an illness from getting established in a population. When prevention fails, we end up in mitigation- basically trying to stop an established illness from getting worse and continuing to multiply.
In the US, the time for prevention was January and early February. We blew that. So, now we are in mitigation looking at a virus that is firmly established in all 50 states, Guam and Puerto Rico. In States like California and Ohio that were aggressive with mitigation, the cases are increasing 3-5% per day. States that were slow to put in mitigation like Florida and Louisiana, the rates were 15-30% until they put in mitigation. That critical misstep in prevention resulted in a $2 trillion spending package and millions of unemployed people.
What is worrisome is that if the US blows mitigation and we see rates return to 15-30% increases daily, then we're back to more spending packages and more unemployed people.
It's not going to be an easy road until there's a vaccine or an effective way to lessen the course of the illness so that we don't have millions of people who are sick for 2 to 6 weeks... assuming they don't end up in the hospital or in the morgue.
