I know all the numbers. I know markets recover. I know this is likely very temporary.
What I simply can't understand is how 80,000 Americans can die of influenza in single year and people keep pounding the table about flu vaccines, Tamiflu, and built up immunity which makes flu "not a big deal" in comparison to Covid19. Is it more contangious? Maybe, but the flu is evidently pretty damn contagious. The 80,000 deaths in the US is a fact and worldwide, that number is estimated to be 646,000 in a new study for a single year. Those are dead people from the flu.
In fact, the ONLY nugget of information that is even remotely supportive of Covid19 being worse is the fact it currently has a higher mortality rate, very early on. However, simple logic tells you the unreported cases are likely astronomical in comparison to the reported cases, but death rates are far more likely to be closer to the truth. This indicates the true mortality rate is quite a bit lower, which Fauci published early on and despite somewhat walking it back, still is extrapolating the unknown.
I fully realize the unknown is what's scary. I fully understand it. I support being careful, taking precautions, and even some extreme measures. I just question, when and where does it stop? We gave a new virus a fancy name and it cripples the world while other viruses are causing far more damage and no one cares.
The likely end game is this virus becomes another virus we very poorly combat with vaccines and treatments, but this kills the elderly and weakened at a disproportionate rate...just like the flu does currently (except a lot more people die from it than Covid19).
Some of the difference is indeed that COVID-19 is novel - people tend to be more afraid of "new" things than something that is familiar (just like nuclear power is
statistically, much safer for the environment and for people's health than electricity generation based on burning coal or other fossil fuels, yet many if not most have a violent negative
emotional reaction to the idea of nuclear power, because "oh noes that's scary", while blithely accepting millions of deaths a year from fossil fuels without a second thought).
But COVID-19
is different from the flu. It is quite contagious, and, importantly, infected people can spread the virus long before they begin to feel sick / show symptoms. So it can spread to a large percentage of the population in a given area more effectively than flu can - "stay home if you're sick" has historically kinda sorta worked for keeping the standard flu from spreading as fast, with the main limitation being people who don't follow that simple rule but decide instead to tough it out either because they don't care or because they feel pressured to work (no sick leave, key personnel, etc.). And as a novel virus, nobody has any immunity to it. And most estimates (aside from the president's overly optimistic lies) put a vaccine at a year or a year-and-a-half in the future.
As well, we don't have sufficient testing for COVID-19. Pretty much any doctor's office can tell you if you have a "normal" flu pretty quickly. But the test for COVID-19 is essentially being rationed - you only get it if a doctor decides you need it,
and then only if they have the right connections to get it done. There are tons of people who should be tested who haven't been tested yet. The administration promised to have 1 million test kits ready to go in a week. They managed 75 thousand - that's missing the mark by 92.5%. As of a few days ago, we had tested about 11,000 people in the US
in total since the beginning of the outbreak. Meanwhile, South Korea is testing 20,000 people every
single day at this point. The combination of people with the virus looking "normal" while still being contagious, and the acute lack of testing capability, means the next best way to stop the spread is to keep people from congregating. (And the acute lack of concern / downplaying from the current administration, up until the last week, and the squandering of all the time since January that they could have been ramping up to fight this has really hurt things, and has not helped public confidence.)
Places like Disneyland, SXSW, and various conventions like WWDC, all have the property of bringing together people from all over the country, putting them in close contact for a while, and then sending them all back out across the country/world - a nearly perfect way to spread a virus all over the place. So shutting them down is pretty much a no-brainer. Doing the same with stores and schools and sports events is the same idea but at a much smaller scale - each store has a smaller impact, but multiplied by 10's of thousands of stores (not just Apple Stores) across the country, it may help.
A lot of the more serious cases require assistance breathing, and need such care for quite some time (not just a night or two). It is said we have a capacity of roughly 1 million hospital beds in the US, and indications are that only a fraction of those are equipped with the proper respiratory gear to keep such patients alive. So we only have a very limited capacity to deal with - and save the lives of - the sickest patients.
China built two large modern hospitals in Wuhan
in a few weeks, to add capacity to deal with the sickest patients. They also took all sorts of draconian measures to quickly combat the virus - widespread curfews, mandatory isolation and closures and such - that most western nations won't or can't duplicate. (To be clear, China initially tried to deny and suppress information about the virus, and that just made it a lot worse, but then they went after it with great fanatical zeal.)
Italy, on the other hand, ignored the situation for too long, and their healthcare system got pushed far beyond capacity. We can't - nor do we want to - duplicate China's most draconian measures, but neither do we want to let our healthcare system get stretched past the breaking point - we don't want to be in the situation of thousands of people dying because doctors had to choose to let them die to save others.
This is where social distancing and self isolation and cancelling large events can make a huge difference - a lot of people will get COVID-19 over the next year or so, and for many it'll be an unpleasant but entirely survivable thing, like the flu. But for some, they will need hospitalization and lengthy treatment to survive it. Given that the total capacity of our healthcare system is
relatively fixed, we need to avoid overloading that system with too many sick people
at the same time. If everyone gets sick at the same time, it'll exceed our capacity to treat the sickest cases, while if everyone gets sick at some random point over the next year, it's much less of a hit on the healthcare system at any one time. There's a graph floating around showing this - a rapid uncontained outbreak creates a huge sudden spike in hospitalization needs that far surpasses the fixed horizontal line of available healthcare, which would mean a lot of people going untreated and potentially dying. But the same number of sick people (with the same percentage of cases needing hospital care),
spread out over a much longer period of time, means that the same number of people will need hospitalization
but they won't all need it at the same time. The curve for the number of people sick at any given time stays under the horizontal line showing hospital capacity. This means far fewer deaths - and deaths because the patient couldn't be
saved, rather than because the patient couldn't be
treated.
So... it's getting all the attention and concern right now because it's novel, but also because (between contagiousness, undetectability, and severity) it has tremendous potential to overwhelm our healthcare system, and cause a lot more deaths, in a short time, than the flu. If we don't handle it properly. And, for quite a long time, the government didn't get out in front of it and say, "here's what everybody needs to do to get through this" in a clear, reassuring, and trustworthy way. Instead we got, "well we only have 15 cases, and soon it will be 5, and then 0", and great fear from those in charge that anything other than downplaying it might hurt the precious stock market (well that certainly turned out well, right?). And, with that lack of clear, concise, and trustworthy information from the government, we get panic buying and rumors/fears flying rampant on social media and such. (And hoarding and profiteering on hand sanitizer when plain old soap is actually more effective, and people trying to collect a six month supply of canned food and TP, because they're acting like it's the end of the world rather than just a trying time. To quote Agent K: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.")
I hope that dealing with COVID-19 will give the world a different way of looking at the "common" flu, put it in a new perspective, and make us, collectively, take it more seriously. If
everyone got flu shots, if sick people stayed home, if we took a few other small (for each person) steps, we could reduce deaths from the flu. I hope we can convince
everybody to do that now. But we can't play it off as "why care about disease A when there's also disease B?". Down that path lies more deaths and suffering, not less.
