The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released their estimates for the influenza season from October 1, 2019 and February 29, 2020. During that period, an estimated 34 to 49 million people have been sickened with the flu, with 350,000 to 620,000 hospitalized.
The estimated deaths from the flu is between 20,000 and 52,000 people.
It’s still not the flu. If it spreads like the flu, unchecked because “it’s just like the flu” and only affects the same proportion of the population as the flu (nope, there are no existing immunities or vaccines) and somehow doesn’t crash our HCS (nope, common flu often pushes it close to saturation), then 200,000 to 520,000 would die since it kills at least 10 times as many as the flu.
Feel free to check my math as you go. I am using real, publicly available numbers.
However, since there are no immunities or vaccines, all 300+ million Americans would be vulnerable. Since the best record in the world at fighting this is no better than 1% fatality rate for infected in a large scale outbreak, that’s 3 million dead. Since our HCS cannot handle anywhere near that number of sick, we get 1 in 15 numbers, like Italy. 20 million dead. Just in the USA. And no, it would not just be worthless old sick people.
Those are the real “let it burn out of control until it burns itself out” nightmare scenario numbers. Scary, huh?
Countermeasures for slowing the disease spread keep the number of cases that exist at any one time in check so as to preserve the ability of our HCS to deal with it. They give us more time to create vaccines. And possibly it gives us time to develop some herd immunity among survivors so all the doctors, nurses and patients aren’t all sick at the same time. Would it not suck to be saved at the hospital from your heart attack just to die of CV contracted in the hospital that saved you anyway? (Heart disease is one of the underlying conditions that results in a high fatality rate).
So maybe you can see why all the measures put into place by over 100 governments around the world, announced by grim-looking politicians are important. So, instead of ‘but flu’ maybe you should do something proactive.
Again, feel free to check my math