Suppose this is as contagious as norovirus, which also survives for extended periods on surfaces unlike the vast majority of viral contagions. It is transmittable by air, but by far most transmission by contact.
20 million cases in the USA, 200 million world wide.
Apply coronavirus death rate of .5 percent for modern country, as per south korea expanded testing results.
That’d be 100,000 dead in USA, overwhelmingly killing just the old, especially old with comorbidities. That’s if nothing was done, and if this wild comparison was accurate (it isn’t). For unknown reasons coronavirus isn’t killing the young like typical flu.
Norovirus transmission is crippled if people wash their hands with soap and water (or sanitizer).
Have oldsters avoid theatres, schools, crowds. Have them wash their hands and be extra careful with food prep and serving transmission.
Death rate drops to tiny fraction.
Infection rate crashes after April with moister air.
There’s a once every few hundred year chance it mutates into something very scary, but probably we’re mostly fine.
Maybe the story will be worse in Iran and elsewhere.
There are tons of unwarranted, ridiculous assumptions and comparisons built into this post, but it’s an example of a worst case scenario the government should have contingency plans for.
It’s not an estimation of what I think will happen.
Fun thought exercise for me as a no-nothing keyboard warrior
oh the numbers i came up with are similar to typical annual death rate for flu, what a coincidence
The death rate has to be much lower than reported for corona virus.
You have to test a large number of the population to be able to get an accurate death rate.
This just hasn’t been done yet.
I’ve seen estimates as low as .6% and even 2% but there have been a lot of people not tested yet and this virus has only been around for a few months.
So the projections by Harvard's Director of Infectious Disease and the WHO's leading biostatistician (among many others) are "ridiculous"?
See my earlier post up-thread. If these guys are even stupidly, orders of magnitude wrong, we are still potentially looking at 15M+ dead worldwide. If they're right, the numbers are staggering - 106M to 185M dead using the Harvard estimates and CURRENT CFR, by the WHO. While I don't think we will hit the 40-70% infected rate Harvard is projecting (maybe just blind optimism on my part), even a 10% infection rate will be a disaster of proportions we haven't seen in over a hundred years - and I don't personally think that's "ridiculous" in the slightest.
I don't understand why so many of you keep doubting what we're up against. It has a higher current CFR (Case Fatality Rate) than the Spanish Flu PER THE WHO - not some made-up numbers..is MORE contagious (much higher R0 number) AND we have global travel plus subways, busses and other mass transit that we did not have in 1918. We also have 7.8B vs 1.8B people worldwide, so the math is not in our favor. I'd love to hear a reasoned, objective viewpoint based on hard data as to why we won't hit the types of numbers that are being discussed. I actually hope that we WON'T - but the objective data so far says otherwise.