Adjusted for population, it is not the highest number.
Also...
China is pathologically deceitful - According to the data, Italy has more than twice as many deaths as China, and almost the same number of infections as China. No serious person can believe that China's numbers are accurate.
Also...
COVID-19 has been in the USA for two months.
Seasonal influenza has been in the USA for 5.5 months.
Minimum CDC Estimates for Seasonal influenza...
Cases - 38 million
Deaths - 23,000
Finally...
The USA COVID-19 "Case Fatality Rate" has held steady between 1.2% and 1.5% for almost three weeks.
That number will decline significantly when massive wide scale USA testing begins to capture the huge percentage of non-infected Americans in the data.
Bottom Line...
We did not shut down the country to prevent 23,000 influenza deaths.
Why did we shut it down to prevent far fewer deaths from COVID-19?
“Adjusted for population, it is not the highest number.”
You can take any number and adjust it for anything, if you want. Why not adjust it for the world population and make it even lower?
The USA COVID-19 “Case Fatality Rate” has held steady between 1.2% and 1.5% for almost three weeks.
That number will decline significantly when massive wide scale USA testing begins to capture the huge percentage of non-infected Americans in the data.
Case Fatality rate is only useful under two conditions:
1) where people who are going to die from the disease do so nearly immediately upon being detected as having the disease.
2) After the outbreak, or at least the cohort, has completely ended.
Or else what you are really measuring is speed of spread. As long as the speed of spread is growing consistently, the case fatality rate will be relatively stable. When the disease begins to limit, the case fatality rate will rise to it’s actual ratio.
Because of the extreme length between symptom/detection and death, and then a further length to recovery, there is a sort of flattened ‘S’ shape added to the also-flattened upside-down Bell-curve of the case fatality rate during the outbreak.
To exercise control and get trillions of spending money?
Minimum CDC Estimates for Seasonal influenza...
Cases - 38 million
Deaths - 23,000"
Yup.
The good news about this map, a pre-Corona snapshot, is the depth and breadth of the flu season tranched an immune-active population in the US. It may end up being our silver lining...
and that’s another thing...did they test for flu when they tested for covid?.....be interesting to know the overlap...
In a normal flu season there are millions of people who don’t get flu shots and don’t take any special precautions, but who never get the flu. I am one of them. I’m not a hermit. I live and work in a large diverse city.
So many assumptions about the Chinese virus assume that 100% of the population is susceptible to it. We don’t know that.
On a side note, I’d be interested to know Chinese virus infection rates among those who had flu shots vs those who did not.