[belltaco]

Thats a series of anectdata, which will happen in any data set.

>But we were sold Ebola by the media, and we got an unusually deadly seasonal flu.

The current death toll is after lockdowns, social distancing, mask wearing, staggered hospitalizations etc. Without those the death toll would be in the millions, how is that just a unusually deadly seasonal flu? A bad flu season is 65k deaths. Current death toll is ~400k.

[GuB-42]

Ebola actually killed less in the world in total than a single flu season in the US.

With all the talk about it is almost sounds like Covid-19 is a death sentence. It is not, it is a statistical increase. GP know 8 Covid-19 mild cases and zero severe. Let's estimate the chance of severe Covid-19 over reported cases to about 1/10. That's a probability of 43%, GP's experience is typical.

One interesting bit of stats I've seen is that catching Covid-19 roughly doubles your chances of dying this year, regardless of your age. It is a lot but still in the realm of statistics.

And as you probably know, we are very bad at judging statistics instinctively, and for most of us, it is all we have. Otherwise, most people would stop smoking. If Covid-19 can (statistically) cost you one year of your life, smoking costs you 10.

[war1025]

> how is that just a unusually deadly seasonal flu

A smaller percentage of a very large number is still a very large number.

In March / April, people were claiming something on the order of a >10% fatality rate. We are much closer to 1%, and it drops off down to practically nothing once you get to anyone below middle-age.

[loudmax]

I don't know what news outlets you were following, but medical reports were indicating a case fatality rate around 0.3% by April. This works out to something like 1 in 300.

Since the fatalities skew heavily toward the elderly, in practice this means if everyone catches Covid, most people are unlikely to have a close personal friend or relative who dies as a result of the disease. Sounds not too bad, right?

A fatality rate of 0.3% also means that if everyone in the United States catches it, a million people will die. We're coming up on the equivalent of a 9/11 every day (though again, skewing heavily toward the elderly). You can't rely on personal experience to put these kinds of numbers into perspective.

[war1025]

> This works out to something like 1 in 300.

> A fatality rate of 0.3% also means that if everyone in the United States catches it, a million people will die

Exactly.

The first sounds completely acceptable. The second sounds unacceptable. They are exactly the same number, just worded differently for effect.

If you go with "Dunbar's Number" of 150 people that a single person can meaningfully maintain a social relationship with, that means if everyone in the US caught coronavirus, statistically you would have a 50% chance of knowing someone that died of it. Those seem like perfectly acceptable odds.

I think that cuts to the core of it. It's a tragic situation, but it is unclear whether it is catastrophic. That means we should be unsurprised that society is pretty evenly split over whether the measures we've taken have been too much or too little.