| I believe you are conflating the case fatality rate with the infection fatality rate. > Kilpatrick, from UC Santa Cruz, said that if the estimates from New York stand up to scrutiny, the infection fatality rate in New York City would be approximately 0.8%. > [...] > Epidemiologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, for example, analyzed data from the Diamond Princess, the ill-fated ship on which more than 700 passengers got infected. Researchers adjusted for the fact that cruise passengers are older than average and estimated the coronavirus’ infection fatality ratio as 0.6%. [...] > Now let’s talk about the flu. Comparisons to the flu keep coming back like a many-headed hydra, and they roared back last week with a vengeance. > The estimates I’ve seen for influenza IFR range from about 0.14% on the upper end to 0.04% on the lower end. So if the IFR for this coronavirus ends up being around 0.5%, that’s still many times worse than the flu. [...] > Marc Lipsitch, head of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, has estimated that ultimately 20% to 60% of the population could be infected with COVID-19. By comparison, because of immunity provided by flu shots and past infections, only about 10% to 20% of the population gets sick with influenza every year, according to Kilpatrick. > Kilpatrick sketched out what this meant: “If it’s five times deadlier than the seasonal flu, and three times as many people are going to get it, that means we’re going to get 15 times as many deaths. And 15 times 30,000, which is the middle-of-the-road kind of a seasonal flu year, that’s 450,000 deaths — about half a million deaths — that’s a pretty big, scary number, I think.” All quoted text is from https://www.propublica.org/article/what-antibody-studies-can... Is 450,000 people "hardly anyone"? More importantly, what matters more to you: their lives, or corporate profits? |