Quote:
Originally Posted by Jgkram
... As of March 25th there have been a total of 22,030 deaths world wide from the COVID-19 virus (1,046 in the US) compared to 291,000 deaths from the flu world wide (2019 data). ..
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There were between 38,000,000 and 42,000,000 cases of the flu, and between 23,000 and 59,000 deaths in the US alone.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm
That's a death rate between 0.06% and 0.14%
Conversely, there are currently 68,440 cases of COVID-19 and 994 deaths in the US. (this is already out of date, but it's good enough for this conversation and it doesn't change the death rate.)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html
That's a death rate of 1.45% These are not estimates, these are real numbers. That's over 10 times the worst-case death rate estimate of the flu.
Imagine now if we allowed COVID-19 to infect the same amount of people that got the flu. At 1.45%, that would be between 551,000 to 609,000 dead people in the US alone.
This is why some of us take it seriously.