More like 2/3 of the people on Free Republic have lost the ability of empirical thought. 99% of the folks who get covid 19 make a complete recovery similar to the seasonal flu but the whole country is shut down. Yeh that makes sense.
I believe it is closer to 98%. While that doesn’t sound like much of a difference, it means the CFR is around 2% however, the New England Journal of Medicine found that the overall death rate was slightly lower, around 1.4% and it could be less if one factors in very mild and asymptomatic cases but without widespread testing, it is unknown figure.
The death rate from seasonal flu is typically around 0.1% in the U.S.
The flu has an R0 value of about 1.3
The R0 value for COVID-19 is between 2 and 3
But perhaps more importantly:
The hospitalization rate for flu is 1.4% vs 4.6% for COVID-19
"99% of the folks who get covid 19 make a complete recovery similar to the seasonal flu ..."
“More like 2/3 of the people on Free Republic have lost the ability of empirical thought. 99% of the folks who get covid 19 make a complete recovery similar to the seasonal flu but the whole country is shut down. Yeh that makes sense.”
First of all, the average CFR of the common flu is 0.1%. So even your obliviously underinformed number is 10 common flus.
Our HCS is built to handle a bad flu season. Not 10 bad flu seasons at the same time. So if as many people caught CCP-19 as catch the common flu (about 20% of the population each season), at the same pace of infection, that would collapse the HCS right there. And take the economy with it.
But fortunately, due to mitigation, only about 2% of the population has been infected with CCP-19 (so far) instead of the 20% that catch the flu each year. Nevertheless, CCP-19 is killing people at 10+ times the rate of the common flu on your average in-season flu day.
How many people would be dying each day if 10 times as many were infected (and magically our HCS didn’t collapse, somehow)? Well, 10 times as many seems like a reasonable answer. That means we’d have people dying right now at 100 times the rate they do from the flu in flu season.
Now consider that the penetrance of a new population by a “novel” virus is estimated to be between 50% and 95% depending on the R0 and incubation period of the virus. Looking at the UT Spring Break group that went to Mexico (which wasn’t even reporting more than a few cases at the time) and came back 70% infected, that seems like a reasonable compromise until we get a better data set.
So instead of dying at 10 times the rate of the common flu with 2% infected, or 100 times the rate of the flu with 20% infected, …
Use your “empirical” thinking skills to do the math yourself.
Why do you think the Chinese tore up all the roads into their main transportation hub and tanked their economy for at least 2 quarters?
You should email them with your conclusions about how this is “similar to the seasonal flu” and give them some peace of mind. Won’t *they* feel silly.