[toyg]

IMHO it’s futile to try to keep the economy “on the up” at a time like this, we’re basically throwing good money into a fire. Just take the hit and try to keep people alive; as soon as the emergency phase is over, the market will rebound on its own. Humanity existed before capitalism, surely it can live a few months without it.

[blauditore]

I think the point is that the measures are overblown in relation to the hazard COVID-19 actually constitutes. It is a pandemic, and relatively virulent.

However, symptoms and mortality rate have been exaggerated by the media, causing more panic than necessary. If a wave of Influenza would get the same attention and monitoring, it would expose similarly shocking stats ("exponential" growth, and around half a million deaths yearly). Yet there are very few measures actually taken by governments there, because it's difficult and basically an uphill fight.

For what it's worth, note that alleged mortality rates for COVID-19 are in fact just very rough upper bounds, since there is no systematic testing happening yet on a large scale. The closest to that is probably South Korea, where deaths make up less than 1% of confirmed cases. In contrast, Influenza mortality rates are always based on estimations, not just on documented infections.

[toyg]

> symptoms and mortality rate have been exaggerated by the media

Dude, believe what you will, but in the most affected areas, they can't even bury bodies fast enough, they are literally filling up churches with coffins. This does not happen with influenza, because we have vaccines and mitigation techniques that we do not have with Covid19. We don't even know for sure if or when reinfection can occur.

In a regular year, influenza in Italy kills 400-500 people, and simple pneumonia kills another 6,000 to 8,000. We've had 2,000 deaths from covid19 in 2 weeks, and concentrated in 20% of the country. Do we really want to "let it run its course" for a full year over the whole of Europe? At this rate, in two months we'll have broken all records.

You underestimate this at your peril.

[robben1234]

>In a regular year, influenza in Italy kills 400-500 people

Data is literally one query away.

>We estimated excess deaths of 7,027, 20,259, 15,801 and 24,981 attributable to influenza epidemics in the 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17, respectively, using the Goldstein index.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...

[toyg]

My data does not agree with your data: http://www.assis.it/dati-istat-sui-decessi-da-influenza/