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by xster 2275 days ago
Rather, the previous administration was just more successful bringing the full weight of the media machine on turning down news of the previous H1N1 pandemic which had 2 orders of magnitudes more cases and deaths so far. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-sars...

This current pandemic just happened to have happened outside the US so it couldn't keep the lid on the news.
1 comments
Juxtapoz 2275 days ago
According to your source

> The coronavirus outbreak is more severe than the 2009 outbreak of H1N1, or swine flu. That illness infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people worldwide but only had a mortality rate of 0.02%.

1.4 billion worldwide, not just in the United States.

The mortality rate is much worse for coronavirus and it hasn't been around since 2009 so we've yet to see how many cases and deaths occur.

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ganeshkrishnan 2275 days ago
Just an FYI: the mortality rate of swine flu is based on estimate of total people infected (around 60 million cdc estimate) while the mortality rate of covid is from confirmed cases as we don't have estimates of total infection with some speculating that it's 10x of confirmed cases
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im3w1l 2275 days ago
We know from the cruise ships that mortality is in the 0.1% - 1% ballpark. With a broken down healthcare system it may go a bit beyond 1%, but not a lot. Data from Italy shows many people who get a ventilator die anyway, so running out of them wont make the figure jump.
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