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by ryanwaggoner 2326 days ago
It kills fewer total than the flu right now, but that’s a specious comparison. The flu infects orders of magnitude more every year. If this becomes as widespread as the flu and kills 2% (20-50x as many as the flu) and puts another 10-20% in the hospital, it’ll be total global pandemonium. Healthcare systems will collapse, supply chains will collapse, economic depressions, etc. “Only 2%” sounds so benign, but that’s a huge number of people, and having many more in the healthcare system means that deaths from all other causes will go up too. Widespread panic and shortages, etc. This has been studied. As I recall, it takes about 3% of the population needing medical care before the system collapses.

We’d survive but it wouldn’t be pretty. I really doubt that’ll happen here, but this is a serious risk.

1 comments

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/flu_pneumonia_mort...

Let's panic when it's time to panic, in the meantime it's business as usual. You add "virus" and "china" in the same sentence and people start to lose their shit way to easily. We had worse before, we'll be just fine.