You've been downplaying this from the start. Never underestimate one's ability to refuse to acknowledge they were wrong.

In 2 months, it's already killed over 41,000 Americans, more than the annual fatalities caused by flu. And that's AFTER locking down the whole country. It has a revised R₀ of greater than 5.7, which means it's about 6x more contagious than flu.

I've come to the conclusion that most thick headed individuals will continue to downplay this right up to the point that it hits home for them. A spouse. A parent. A friend. Or even themselves. Until then it's a hoax, or the flu, or a conspiracy to get us to brush our teeth.

Anything but a global killer.

In the CARES Act it benefits hospitals to inflate Covid numbers. They receive an extra 15% for Covid deaths. Don’t think that will inflate numbers at all?

The actual numbers on this are complete BS. We truly don’t know how long this has been here. We don’t know how many people have been infected. We have no idea how many people are walking around right now with it. We don’t know the true death rate.

We do know that almost every hospital death is attributed to Covid. Die from a heart attack and tested post mortem? Covid. Oh, but patient had extensive history of heart disease? Still Covid.

What no one is talking about is that we stack our elderly in places that are a step above concentration camps.

And no one is talking about how our nation’s overall health is terrible. Every single underlying health issue is related to obesity. The word from the government should be eat healthy, exercise, be a healthy weight, and get outside every day for sun and fresh air. Those steps alone would mitigate the impact of any future virus.

Oh, but go support your local fast food place....

This is where the anti-intellectual nutjobs come in and question everything. I'm surprised this guy didn't bring up the 5G rollout as the real cause of COVID.

Examples like these make me think the internet was a mistake.

I’m not some right wing conspiracy nut job. I’m not saying this is not serious. I’m saying the government incentivized hospitals.

Maybe read the entire post before you make assumptions?

60,000 people died from the flu in 2018 in the US with a vaccine!

SARS-CoV-2 is killing people around the globe - novel viruses have a way of doing that - but it is not a global society killer and at this point shouldn’t continue to be treated as such.

Does that mean we discount the very real clinical and medical impacts it has on people? NO, it means you identify the most at risk and work to protect them, fully understanding there will be some outside that group that experience severe disease and die. In that sense, it is similar to influenza. We also must continue working to provide front-line health workers with proper PPE, and build sizable stockpiles at the hospital up to national level.

Does that mean we flip the switch and end all restrictions? NO, clearly social distancing has served its intended purpose of not overwhelming health systems across the nation. Maintaining those restrictions until zero new infections or a vaccine is unrealistic, but the proposed phased relaxation based upon infection trends seems a prudent balancing of public health and economic concerns. Testing capability is increasing weekly and surveillance will be necessary to identify and tamp down any future local waves of infection.

Today, we have no idea what actual mortality of this thing is. CFR is 5%+ in many countries, even the USA, but multiple antibody studies from around the globe so far estimate actual mortality between 0.1 and 0.5%. Again, does that negate the real clinical impacts this has on some people? NO! What it does do, however, is better inform public policies and individual actions...

Some of you guys keep talking about the death rate being low, but conveniently leave out how much more contagious this is. The 2 are correlated in producing a higher “rate” of fatalities. This is a medical crisis. Someone called me a liar earlier when I said my ER doctor friend said it’s a war zone in NYC. 2 seconds online and you can find the stats of overwhelmed facilities.

the above post is spot on imho, we were not prepared, social distancing is proving to work in mitigating the impact on our health system, and we need to open the economy ASAP but in a measured non emotional way. Not protest that the government is trying some nefarious plot to keep you locked up, or that somehow every respected medical center is complicit in trying to steal money (15k) from the tax payers per head. That would be a synchronized execution of fraud on such a grand scale it just doesn’t make common sense.

The statistics won’t really be known until this is over and the post-event data is analyzed.

But two important factors:

the typical annual epidemic normally doesn’t result in so many people requiring hospitalization.

and normally the contagious and symptomatic period is 24-72 hours, not two weeks.

that’s why the hospitals are overrun.

Yes. I looks like several studies are coming out from around the globe with similar conclusions, one being that COVID-19 has no where near the fatality rate that we all believed early on and that it's way more contagious and prevalent than we thought. Most of the country outside of NYC and a few other places have plenty of healthcare resources. We locked down the country to buy us time, it's not and cannot be the long term strategy. We needed to figure out who did and did not have it and give the medical field time to catch up and science time to develop tests. Well it looks like the CDC botched the later and we are stuck buying fake test kits from China. With how contagious this is, everyone may be exposed to it and herd immunity kick in well before a vaccine is available unless we continue to shelter in place for the next 12 to 18 months.