Anybody who thinks this is a hoax should go volunteer in a hospital for the next two weeks.
My husband volunteers at a nearby hospital. He thinks it — the overreaction — is a hoax.
My wife and I have been frequent volunteers at the Life Care Center in Kirkland for years. It was a fine facility, but there are reasons why this place was vulnerable and the first disaster related to the Coronavirus in this country. I was one of the first on this forum to say that it was something serious and got ample criticism. Since that time however the hype has snowballed out of control and it has become one of the greatest overreactions ever perpetrated on the world at any time. If you added up the number of people who fell down in their tubs, passed out on the toilet, or choked on their toothpaste, the worldwide casualty rate in the same time period would be greater.
“Anybody who thinks this is a hoax should go volunteer in a hospital for the next two weeks.”
During every flu season for as long as I can remember, the local Gannet rag has reported that the region’s hospitals are at or above capacity due to the influenza epidemic de jure. I don’t think the COVID-19 is a hoax. I do believe that the media-driven hysteria and political over-reaction is a hoax given their near silence in response to equally dangerous influenza pandemics and epidemics in the recent past that affected and killed a lot more people than COVID-19. For example, during the week that ended December 21, 2019, 300 Americans died of “ordinary” influenza: https://nypost.com/2019/12/28/flu-cases-in-nyc-spike-early-as-deaths-climb-across-us/. Even the NY Times is capable of reporting the facts as to the deadly 2017-2018 (80,000 USA deaths) without hysteria — when it want to: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/health/flu-deaths-vaccine.html
Anyone who yells “hoax” at any rational analysis is part of the problem.
This article does not call the outbreak a hoax. It uses known, valid numbers to analyze the big unknown for corona - the infectivity rate, and the derivative mortality rate.