In a bad flu year, the USA experiences around 80,000 flu related deaths. What we are seeing now isn't even in any way close a bad flu year. It is a panic driven by the media and the underlying anxieties of sectors of the populace. The govt reacts to the media and the panic because they don't want to be perceived as fiddling while Rome burns. The govt reaction then serves as "evidence" for the media and the hysterics that the thing really is serious. It's a self licking ice cream cone.
The cruise ships should have served to de-escalate the whole thing. Cruise ships and the typical patrons of them are the perfect environment for a virus to wreak devastation. Yet three cruise ships had to be quarantined and the end result was like 6 people dead out of 9,000 total. IMO, there are lots of people out there with the virus that don't even experience symptoms. Thus the morbidity and mortality rate is far lower than reported. How many per 1,000 who have been on a cruise die within three weeks of the cruise? I'll bet the figure is 2 or 3. That's just ordinary circumstances, ordinary flues and other bugs + heart attacks, strokes, etc.
Again, this is a flu and it will infect and kill at the same rate as the flu. It will be old news in a couple of months.
Hi Eric,
I don't know if covid-19 is as dangerous as the CDC says it is or not
And I agree the media is fueling the panic. But the flip-side to panic is denial. Both are caused by fear.
Spreading panic is not helpful, but it is also not helpful to draw the wrong conclusion that an unusually deadly virus is like ordinary flu based on evidence that really shows extraordinary measures taken to contain it worked.
And I agree the government can be forced to respond to the panic caused by the media. That is one reason I am looking at the data. To try to understand whether the government is justified in taking the actions they are.
You are right situation with covid-19 in the US right now is not as bad as the flu - but why is that? Because it just arrived? Because of extraordinary measures taken to contain it? Or because it is not as dangerous as the CDC says? I don't know.
China is the only place where for a period of time they ignored covid-19, everywhere else they are taking drastic measures to contain it. So if it's just an ordinary flu, why did China eventually begin to take drastic measures to contain it: restricting travel, locking down cities, disrupting their economy, and building new hospitals? The press in China is not like the press in the US, I don't believe they are responsible for the panic in China. (Maybe there was a fluke panic in Wuhan and it spread and the government had to take action? Because of international pressure? I suppose it's possible.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pic...-hospitals-in-days-to-combat-coronavirus.html
China is building two hospitals in less than two weeks to combat coronavirus
https://medium.com/@kasprdata/track...side-china-with-alternative-data-c0c9b8e592d4
On 10 Jan 2020, the first death from
Coronavirus 2019 (Covid-19), was reported in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. Within two weeks, millions of people were locked down in the second largest Economy in the world.
In China, the epicentre of the outbreak, the government’s efforts to contain the virus has led to massive disruptions in China’s manufacturing sector, with reports that most companies ‘ground to a halt’ as the travel bans began to bite.
Most companies in the manufacturing sector were cut-off from supply chains and unable to find workers. Even those “that have been granted permission to resume operations face critical shortages of staff, with huge swathes of China still under lockdown and some local workers afraid to leave their homes.”
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-changes-pollution-over-china.html
The Chinese government has closed business and restricted travel between cities. Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began, has been the subject of especially harsh measures. The impact of those measures is reflected in local pollution levels; a map of the city shows an astonishing drop in NO2 levels between Jan. 1 and Feb. 25.