I don’t get all this what if and what about. I guess people who die from flu related pneumonia were old, frail and going to die anyway, so why count the old and frail at all? If that’s the case, the flu really doesn’t kill anyone at all. At this point, the best case mortality for COVID-19 seems to be about 2%, and even that is about 20x higher than influenza. So, those who “would have died of the flu anyway” are a very small fraction of that number.
This isn’t hard to understand:
-COVID-19 is more contagious than influenza.
-COVID-19 has a much higher mortality than influenza.
-If allowed to spread unchecked, it has the potential to become a pandemic.
None of that is doom and gloom. Stopping this thing from spreading is important. H1N1, just 10 years ago, infected a billion people, but fortunately had a mortality rate of just 0.02%. A 2% mortality would have killed 20 million people. Of course, it wouldn’t have actually killed that many, because massive steps would have been taken to control it if the mortality were 100x higher than it was. That is where we are now, trying to stop it or slow it down, because not doing anything could be really bad...
Not exactly my point. The frail and old die from flu in higher numbers than other adults. So if the same people die from Corona virus, it is basically no additional burden on the general population.
My impression by glancing at news items is CV is attacking the old and weak more than healthy adults.
I do not mean to undercut risks of CV. It probably is more contagious than standard flu. But the death stats look worse because CV is killing many of the same people who were going to die from standard flu.
To summarize what is the fatality rate from CV for adults between 18 & 65 who are healthy? That is the most critical stat.