Right, “in the elderly it kills”. Well so does the common flu kill the elderly min the vast majority of cases..
Dead is dead.
About 20,000 in this country already DEAD from this seasons flu and not a word about it.
Entirely manufactured panic!
Unless like me you are in the elder category. Except I get a flu shot every autumn and it either protects me or greatly lessens the severity. There is no vaccine for covid19. Nor is there likely to be one available to the masses for months, if not a year. So pardon me for not feeling confident about how this is turning out. Yes if it hits you, you might have a case of the sniffles, but when you sit next to me on the bus, in the restaurant, in the pew in church you may have inadvertantly killed me.
Death rate in the elderly is up to 14.8% for those over 80. I forget the rate for those 70 and up, but it’s > 8%. 60 and up is 3.6 - 3.8%.
Death rate for the common flu is 0.83% for those over age 65.
Heck of a difference.
That said, death rate is not the issue here. The issue is occurrence of “very serious” cases that require hospitalization (~15%) and ICU (~5%). That and the fact this thing spreads asymptomatically, spreads via aerosol transmission, spreads like wildfire (very high R0 factor) and can live on surfaces for days (up to 9). Those are also very big differences from “the common flu”.