[Blahah]

That's a pretty cavalier attitude even if we take your assumptions to be true.

If it's a virulent flu, the last time we had a pandemic with comparable stats was 1918, when we had much less global travel but much worse medical infrastructure. The 1918 Spanish flu infected potentially 1/4 of the world (500 million people at the time) and killed around 2% (variable depending on sources) of the global population - ~40 million.

It's on a different level than SARS/MARS, because this seems to incubate without symptoms in the young and healthy (for now) and then kill when it breaks out in populations of the old and sick. It's spreading faster and being reported differently than anything before.

Some basic advice that everyone should apply during every global outbreak they don't really understand:

- don't travel if you don't absolutely have to

- don't go to hospital unless you absolutely have to

- try to stop touching your face

- wash your hands and face frequently

It's a pandemic, definitely (source - me, I'm working on coronavirus). Don't panic but don't be complacent. Just look after yourself and your family and avoid exposure to potentially high risk.

[soared]

Absolutely incomparable to the Spanish flu. Back then we knew literally nothing about the flu, we sent sick soldiers on public trains to hospitals which very quickly spread the virus to other sick/injured people. We took the exact opposite actions of what we now know is correct. We did everything wrong. It’s not even remotely comparable. Scientists learned about the corona virus category in the late 1960s, 40 years after the Spanish flu.

It’s also not spreading unlike anything before? You can look at the graphs of SARS/MERS/etc and see at times it’s spreading quicker, but not remotely in the realm of never before seen.

Good advice I suppose, but traveling is still fine according to the WHO.

[Blahah]

My point about the Spanish flu was that this is a complex comparison. Statistically it's similar so far. But with very different social parameters (massively increased global travel, vastly better understanding of epidemiology). We are still doing so many things wrong, given what we know. I think it's comparable.

The public numbers are not the same as the ones on GISAID.

[dingaling]

> and killed around 2% (variable depending on sources) of the global population - ~40 million.

To be unemotionally pragmatic: the current World population could handle the death of 40 million, or even 400 million, without macro-disruption.