I remember that panic. We closed down the country for 8 months straight. Oh wait a minute, never mind, that was just a nightmare I had the other night.
But it was the disease’s highest death toll in at least four decades. It eclipses the estimates for every flu season going back to the winter of 1976-1977. Estimates for many earlier seasons were not readily available.
But we know it caused 500,000 (U.S.) deaths in 1917-1918, which was also while WWI was raging across the pond.
We know flu comes every year, but it's impossible to predict a really bad year until you are in the middle of it and then it's really too late. Because it's already peaking.
We're half way to the death count of the worst flu season in 40 years with as lock down. It would have been far worse without a lockdown.
If you move the car off the train track and then the train doesn't hit you, do you say, we shouldn't have move the car, because the train didn't hit us?
The train didn't hit you because you moved the car. CV deaths aren't worse because we did the lock downs.
In 1967-68, when I was a freshman in college, there were 100,000 flu deaths in the U.S., which had at that time a population of about 200,000,000. This was the so-called “Hong Kong” flu. It was a bad flu season, but I don’t remember the economy being shut down.
Robert DeLong wrote:
“Well we are only halfway to the deadly flu season total of 80,000 in 2017-2018
I remember that panic. We closed down the country for 8 months straight. Oh wait a minute, never mind, that was just a nightmare I had the other night.
But it was the disease’s highest death toll in at least four decades. It eclipses the estimates for every flu season going back to the winter of 1976-1977. Estimates for many earlier seasons were not readily available.
But we know it caused 500,000 (U.S.) deaths in 1917-1918, which was also while WWI was raging across the pond.”
Then the question is, why the shutdowns over this virus and not any of the others?