Originally Posted by
unbound
Sorry, but it is you who is buying into BS.
Here is reality:
- If the flu infects 40 million people, we expect to see around 450k people hospitalized and about 30k people to die (yes, there are variations to this, but this is average)
- If COVID-19 infects 40 million people, we expect to see between 4 and 8 million people hospitalized and about 800k people to die
That is why we are taking COVID-19 much more seriously. Furthermore, the infection rate of COVID-19 is actually notably higher (between 2 times and 3 times higher), which means this explodes much, much faster than the flu...which is why we talk about flattening the curve. If we let most of the population just go about their normal businesses, we reach 40 million COVID-19 infections in a few weeks rather than typical flu infections over 6 months (total flu season is 8 months long).
And if we don't flatten the curve, that means even more people will die because people who could be saved won't get sufficient care to be saved.
To answer your question regarding deaths, in Italy, we see about 30 deaths a day from flu. They have been seeing more than that with COVID-19 since March 5th, and the latest report shows that they had over 600 COVID-19 deaths in a day.