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"Why didn't an infectious resperatory illness. with nearly the same symptoms that caused approximately 20 times more deaths cause the same type of chaos?"

The answers to questions like that are simple for those who have had enough time to search around for information and process that information analytically and not emotionally. Many people don't have the time.

The estimates from extrapolations for flu statistics were concluded long after the end of the flu season. The coronavirus epidemic is only trying to get started, while governments try frantically to stop it.

Why are they so afraid? A very high percentage of people with symptoms are needing hospitalization in Italy, for example, and they're not all old. Ventilation is for people under age 60 there in some places now, if those policies haven't been further changed in the last day or so to fit new situations.

As for here, in the U.S.A.? We don't know. Maybe our weather or something else in our environment will slow it down. We won't know, until the further along one way or another. Find today's numbers of positives and negatives for your state, and check those every day.

The solutions for each of us to know what to do are not so simple. Each of us have different situations (older people or people with conditions in households, owners of restaurants employing drug addicts, medical workers terrified about meeting more infected patients than usual, etc.). The best that I can offer is to avoid fear enough to watch the situation, and be ready to make hard personal decisions if necessary.

I hope our weather will be too humid then too warm for the virus to continue spreading. We'll see.

We live in a community in the East side of King County. My wife and I have been frequent visitors to the Kirkland Life Care Center over the years. This illness has been passed around our community for months now, with most people assuming that they had the flu and never suspecting that they had the dreaded Coronavirus. The recent panic has caused to realize that their symptoms may have indicated something other than the flu.

If you were one of the tens of thousands of recent Chinese immigrants who live in our community would you contact medical authorities and complain about your current symptoms if you were not already extremely ill? I know many people who have suffered from symptoms which may have indicated that they have had the Coronavirus. How many of them do you think have had any intention of drawing attention to themselves or their families by getting tested? This is especially true now that authorities have surrounded houses with armed guards in other parts of the country when residents refused to be imprisoned in a designated quarantine facility.

The virus may have already peaked in this area with only vulnerable old or sick people dying from it. The same demographic that succumbed to H1N1 and the flu season of 2017-18 with no one in the press paying any attention. The current “crisis” is as much the result of political nonsense as a threat to the public.

Find today's numbers of positives and negatives for your state, and check those every day.

I can hardly imagine advice which is more of a waste of time and energy. As increased testing illuminates how far and how long this virus has been circulating in places like where we live... the media will have a heyday hyping the numbers.

But in the end the most likely conclusion a year from now will be that this variant of the flu was no worse than many others that have come and gone, and most likely will have caused far fewer deaths. Illnesses that are very deadly tend to burn themselves out in short order. Illnesses that are highly contagious but not so deadly infect a larger number of people. Sometimes there are illnesses that have a combination of lethality that cause a greater number of deaths. But we typically do not know in the first few months whether the current variant is more devastating than previous variants.