2CT Media said:
Look at every death statistic there is, and this virus is no worse than the countless other ways seemingly healthy people die.
Actually it is worse. And it's certainly a lot worse than the typical seasonal flu. I've been harping on the potential numbers for a while. Government officials (Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Brix) have only started providing some potential numbers in the last day or two. They're now saying the United States could see a death toll from around 100,000 to 200,000
"if we do things almost perfectly." That means everyone staying at home, only essential businesses operating in limited capacity and our health care system not being imploded by the tide of cases. It's already a pretty grim sign how many American health care workers and other first responders are getting infected.
If the SARS-CoV-2 virus was allowed to spread in a worst case scenario throughout America's population, around 70% of all Americans would get infected. The resulting death toll would end up being far greater than any of the usual top 10 causes of death in the United States:
Top 10 causes of death in United States, 2017 numbers from CDC
Heart disease: 647,457
Cancer: 599,108
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
Diabetes: 83,564
Influenza and pneumonia: 55,672
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,633
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173
The United States has a population of around 330 million people. If 70% of Americans were to be infected that would come out to 231 million Americans. A 1% mortality rate equals 2.3 million dead Americans. Just at that conservative rate 2.3 million deaths is more than all the numbers in that top 10 list
combined (2,081,531 if you want it added up). It's clear the mortality rate of COVID-19 deaths can scale well above a 1% mortality rate. In Italy, in terms of
confirmed cases the mortality rate is over 10%.
One of the reasons why the situation has become so hellish in the Lombardy region of Italy is many health care workers on the front lines have been getting infected, developing the COVID-19 illness and even dying. Just getting infected and having minor symptoms or none at all still takes a health care worker out of service. That's what makes developing a common and treat-able respiratory infection like pneumonia a very possible death sentence there. So here we are in the United States with half the hospital beds per capita as Italy and all kinds of chronic shortages of everything. Our health care industry only stocks up and staffs up the minimums
to maximize those profit margins.
We already have hospitals in American cities getting overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases. They're building a field hospital in Central Park. I don't remember ever seeing anything like that with any bird flu or swine flu outbreak in the US in the last 40-50 years, certainly not during my lifetime. And we're still in the early days of our version of the outbreak. If SARS-CoV-2 manages somehow to infect most of our nation's population we could easily see a death toll in the millions. There would be far-reaching economic impact from all those deaths. Worse yet, we would all be personally affected. We would all lose friends and family members to this scourge, if some of us didn't get killed by it ourselves. So it's imperative for everyone to do their own individual part at stopping the spread.
We have to do what we can to prevent a worst case scenario from happening.
