But none of those outbreaks (except 1918) practically shut down our entire country for weeks on end and cost $10-15 trillion, while costing 200K lives. Sure, they were serious....of course, but not even on the same order of magnitude as COVID.


But not a single nation anywhere in the world was prepared, not just us. Maybeeeee Taiwan, S Korea, or Japan, but other than that......not a single one.

 

In 1957, US population was half its present and that flu outbreak killed 110,000 before a quickly fielded vaccine stopped it. It was every bit as scary as today’s, but without the panic attack this one has been. No social media, no unreasonable expectation that life was safe.

 

Great point.
Everything has been raised to the level of hysteria.

 

Out of curiosity I researched how many people die in the USA annually... the last stats were published for 2017 by the CDC saying 2.8 million Americans died that year.

The media loves saying “200,000 people died” as if that’s a big deal. In reality most of those people were going to die anyways.

It will be interesting to see if we even have an overall increase in death rate for 2020 once this is all said and done

 

750,000 people die each month in the US. Covid produced a small but perceptible uptick in those numbers.

But the folks having hysterics over this are people who have limited intellectual capacity with regards to big numbers, or are just willfully ignorant.

If hospitals have capacity, then everyone should be allowed to make their own choices. I grudgingly gave them benefit of the doubt for a couple weeks to get the medical capacity under control.

 

Well which is it?
CDC numbers of 2.8 million annually (233,333,000/month)

OR

750,000/month (9,000,000 annually)?

someone’s numbers are off.

 

I think it’s 2.8 million per year. According to the CDC “excess deaths” are back close to the normal trend line in September. Over at the Europe numbers thread.

https://ibb.co/k2k9Jy1

 

You are correct. I got the the 750k from another website (which I cant find with google now), so we'll go with the CDC on that.

That makes the covid more significant, but still in the grand scheme not too far out of the influenza statistical ballpark.

 

Of the 200,000 deaths the CDC said 96% had underlying conditions.

So if 96% were going to die anyways from something other than COVID, that leaves 12,000 Americans dead from the virus.

When you have over 2.8 million Americans dying during a typical year I do not believe 12,000 deaths is going to be very noticeable in any overall trend.

The president comes out and told us not to be afraid of the virus or base our lives around it. He’s giving us great advice.

In 2018 48,344 Americans died from suicide.

It isn’t hard to imagine more than 12,000 people dying from suicide due to the implications of losing their jobs, ability to socialize or have access to places of comfort like gyms or churches. The reaction to the virus is likely to be more deadly than the virus itself.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the news is hyping this up to try to keep our economy bogged down until after the election.

Im still optimistic that things can bounce back pretty quickly to the way the were if the election gives us a favorable result

 

I think it's all been blown out of proportion, but not all of those underlying conditions were going to be fatal, at least not in the short-term

That's one school of thought (to which I subscribe).

Suicide, delayed healthcare, and other health conditions caused by loss of income, loss of social interactions, loss of purpose, etc, etc... yes it could easily add up to more than the covid toll (especially if you subtract out the covid victims who were on death's door anyway before the virus).