This is a genuine question.

There are many unknowns. But at what point would you consider this thing to be serious?

A 20% chance that we go down the road of the Spanish flu? 10%? 1%? 0.1%?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...96f_story.html

Just a clip from the above article. No one knows if the USA will get this bad or not, but the delay in getting valid testing gear out isn't going to help:

The same thing is happening in Italy. “In an effort to cope” with covid-19, “Italy is graduating nurses early and calling medical workers out of retirement,” reporter Loveday Morris wrote in The Post. “Hospitals in the hardest-hit regions are delaying nonessential surgeries and scrambling to add 50 percent more intensive-care beds. ‘This is the worst scenario I’ve seen,’ said Angelo Pan, the head of the infectious-disease unit at the hospital in Cremona.” On Monday, that scenario moved the Italian government to take the astonishing step of shutting down the entire country.

Think about that for a moment. According to the World Health Organization, Italy had three confirmed covid-19 cases three weeks ago. Yes, three — as in, the number of contestants on “Jeopardy!” Now the entire nation of some 60 million people is essentially quarantined, at an untold cost to the economy of a highly developed nation.

Press releases from Italy's Higher Institute of Health (you'll need Google Translate or similar to read them)

https://www.iss.it/comunicati-stampa

A snippet:

Serious? One death is serious, but preventive medicine people deal in YPPL, that is Years of Potential Life Lost. A human is a human but the death of a 90 year old with COPD needing three nebulizer treatments a day so he can go on living on supplemental oxygen tethered by a tube to his oxygen concentrator strikes me as a little LESS serious than the death of a 14 year old. This disease seems to SPARE kids, absent end stage cystic fibrosis, immune deficiency, cancer, or some other life threatening preexisting condition. The terrible thing about the Spanish flu was that unlike most flu strains that tended to take out the very old and very young, that variant seemed to take out young adults of childbearing/rearing age, leaving a lot of orphans.

It’s difficult to deny that this illness is going to play havoc with the elderly with preexisting conditions, but apocalypse it isn’t.

also to consider:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat...s/343rank.html


Germany and Italy have the fourth and fifth highest median age. Half of Italians are over 46.5 years and half of Germans are over 47.8 years. By comparison, the US median age is 40.5 years. That is going to make a huge difference in mortality rate, everything else being equal. While that may not be a bit helpful for the US 65 year old diabetic and morbidly obese guy on his mobility scooter who has renal failure, the impact - from a strictly medical perspective - will be far less than in Italy or Germany.

By the same token, speed of spread is highly affected by population density. The population density in Italy is 518 people per square mile, Germany 603.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...lation_density

the US is 87 people per square mile. One would expect this pandemic to be both slower spreading and less severe in the US than in Europe or Japan.

They also smoke heavily. 23% of the population. Seeing as this is a respiratory virus.... same for China.


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The Spanish Flu came in two waves. The first in early 1918 was fairly mild. Mostly killing the elderly and sick. Then it went quiet for a few months. The second wave in the Fall was the one that was vicious, as you describe.

Your ignorance is bliss isn’t it.

Whoa! Great timing.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-...b7f96383f6d17f