unbelievable death of 10,000,000 million people in USA in one single day. I keep hearing the question: How come public health officials and the media don’t talk about the thousands of people who die from the flu and keep scaring people with the coronavirus, when there are only a few hundred cases and about 20 deaths from it?
I keep hearing the question: How come public health officials and the media don’t talk about the thousands of people who die from the flu every year and keep scaring people with the coronavirus, when there are only a few hundred cases and about 20 deaths from it? The answer is simple.
Because the problem is not measured by the number of people that are sick at the present time, but by the potential to kill if the epidemic goes out of control.
And epidemiologists know history and history repeats itself.
In 1918 the Spanish flu infected 1/3 of the world’s population, killed 50 million all over the world, 600,000 people just in the USA.
An average of 100 people died from the Spanish flu every day just in Boston for the duration of the epidemic.
That’s a death rate 20-50 times higher than the seasonal flu. Epidemiologists and virologists have been warning us for decades about the possibility of the “next big one” coming.
They know that epidemics, although unpredictable, they come in cycles in the most unanticipated way, and that we are largely “due” for the next one.
The world now has 8 billion inhabitants, up from 2 billion in 1918, and the ability to travel and moving around, a key thing for the propagation of a viral disease, has grown exponentially.
The world has public transportation that mixes millions of people every day while commuting, and has stadiums hosting 50,000+ people in dozens of cities every week.
We are in many ways more vulnerable for contagious now that people were in 1918.
Assuming a fatality rate of the coronavirus of just 1%, one tenth of the Spanish flu, and assuming the coronavirus could infect 1/4 of the world’s population if left uncontained, we are talking about 20 million people in the world and 900,000 in the USA dying from the coronavirus, if governments don’t step up the containment and mitigation measures needed.
1% sounds a little until we do the math. So, next time somebody wonders why the experts and public health officials are so worried about the few hundred cases of coronavirus in the USA and the few thousand deaths in the world, and not so much about the regular flu, HIV or suicide, this is why.
Is this a reason to panic? Probably not. As the news will continue to grow about new cases and fatalities spreading to every state and region, people, with natural common sense, will decrease social interactions, minimize public gatherings and practice more hygiene.
Local governments will impose school closures and other restrictions to mitigate the propagation of the disease.
Hospitals will take care of the sickest. Anything we do as a society to reduce the propagation of the disease will be mostly to protect the vulnerable, the sick and the elderly.
Lives will be disturbed for some weeks, perhaps months.
But this will pass. This will surely pass. And hopefully, after this is past history, we will remember that in moments of crisis our differences disappear and we become colorless humans, defined not by a political ideology, race or religion, but by our desire to survive, individually and collectively. Time will tell.
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