I did a little math the other day with some numbers I found online. Based on numbers from Italy and China, which match surprisingly well, they've experienced about 1150 confirmed cases per million population. That's for Italy and the Hubei region of China, where Wuhan is. China as a whole is about 10 cases per million, if you can trust their numbers. At that time, the US was at under 300 cases per million. So, in the hardest hit countries, 1 in 1000 caught the virus and had it bad enough to go to the doctor. That's 0.1%. Some reports say that maybe 80% of infected people never seek care or testing because they have a mild reaction. Even still, that's about 0.5% infected.
Going back to the confirmed cases, 0.1% of the population, 3-4% of those cases died. That adds up to 0.003% of their populations. If you use the lower infection rate from the US, around 0.03% at the time I did these calculations, you're down to 0.0009% death rate in the US.
Yes, that's still a lot of people in raw numbers, about 315,000 Americans, but as a percentage of our population, it's not end of the world stuff. The US currently experiences about 8900 deaths per million population annually without this virus, that's 3.1 million deaths annually, or 10x as many people as will die with Covid-19. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of those dying with Covid are in poor health anyway, and many would likely have died from some other infection within the year.
Clearly, that doesn't make it less tragic when they die, don't misunderstand me, I'm just not seeing why this virus is such a huge deal. We didn't do all this when Ebola came to the US, or any of the various other novel diseases spawned out of Asia.
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Going back to the confirmed cases, 0.1% of the population, 3-4% of those cases died. That adds up to 0.003% of their populations. If you use the lower infection rate from the US, around 0.03% at the time I did these calculations, you're down to 0.0009% death rate in the US.
Yes, that's still a lot of people in raw numbers, about 315,000 Americans, but as a percentage of our population, it's not end of the world stuff. The US currently experiences about 8900 deaths per million population annually without this virus, that's 3.1 million deaths annually, or 10x as many people as will die with Covid-19. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of those dying with Covid are in poor health anyway, and many would likely have died from some other infection within the year.
Clearly, that doesn't make it less tragic when they die, don't misunderstand me, I'm just not seeing why this virus is such a huge deal. We didn't do all this when Ebola came to the US, or any of the various other novel diseases spawned out of Asia.
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