This is so false.
It is not just as deadly as the flu. The latest studies suggest it is about 6 times more deadly than the flu (0.66% to 0.1%).
It also has a transmissions rate anywhere from double the flu to 4.5X the flu depending upon which study you use (flu R0 is around 1.2-1.3, COVID19 is anywhere from 2.6 to 5.6).
using legitimate comparison measures (death certificate to death certificate) this virus has already killed 4.5X as many who died from the flu this season and we aren't even half way through it with semi strong mitigation measures. This is an exponentially more dangerous infectious disease.
The estimate for the flu infections for the last 9 years is 28.4M people contracting it per year and an average of less than 10,000 death certificates filed for flu per year (which leads to the modeling estimates of 16K-50K flu deaths most years).
If you use a 5% number of COVID19 infection, which is likely too high, then you are talking about 16.4M Americans being infected with over 30,000 death certificates so far.
That is not even a remotely similar mortality rate. If you equalize the infected population then the difference in mortality rate would be about 5-6X higher.
Best case scenario is that the transmission rate is a little more than double the flu's (2.6 to 1.2). That transmission rate would mean needing more than 60% infection to stop the spread (you have to get the R0 under 1). If it is on the higher end (one study said 5.6) then you would need over 80% infection rate. Right now all studies suggest an infection rate of no more than 5% (most are 1-3%).
To put the numbers in perspective. Going the straight herd immunity route would likely create documented deaths of at least 480K possibly as high as 650K, which using a similar model to how we calculate flu deaths would lead to an overall final death count estimate of 1.1-3.25M deaths.
Given the differences in health care resources needed to fight it, medical resources would be quickly overwhelmed - the avg stay for someone with COVID19 requiring ICU/ventilator is 20 days, those not needing icu/ventilator are in the hospital an avg of 8 days. The average time to death in the hospital is 7 days. The avg length in time in the hospital for flu is 5 days. COVID19 requires much higher resource use for much longer periods of time.
Also, if you choose to 'let it rip', given how contagious combined with the mortality rate this has, our economy will likely crash within 8-10 weeks due to the amount of people who would start coming down with it - from those who would be asymptomatic but required to quarantine for 2 weeks, for those who get sick and are out for weeks or longer and those who die. The fear from that would cause a large percentage of remaining healthy people to refuse to go to work. The economy would actually be worse than it is right now and would greatly increase how long it would take the country to recover - as well as give you a lower ceiling on your recovery. it is impossible to go back to the economy of Feb 2020 - that economy is gone, for years. It's not coming back - Because we didn't take this seriously we now have to work through the consequences and get ourselves to a new spot that can work. We have to strap on our big boy pants, grow up and handle the big time adversity that is going to be with us for a long time.
It is so obvious that those who like the idea of letting those 60+ stay isolated have no clue what they are talking about. There are 68.7M Americans over 60. How exactly are you going to isolate that many people, do you have an island paradise somewhere they can all stay? Also, you can't just isolate 60+, you would also have to isolate all Americans who are high risk for COVID19 due to co-morbidity factors. For under 60 that is an additional 41.4M Americans. Does your isolated island paradise have room for 110.1M Americans? Of course, that is almost 45% of all American adults, but i'm sure the other 55% can easily make up all that lost labor. Or maybe we need our 81M kids to go to work. Of course they might have to given that 30% of teachers are over 50 and a decent percentage of the under 50 would be high risk so there wouldn't be enough teachers for them to go to school anyways.
China is having issues restarting its economy. Canada has already announced that it does not plan to re-open its border with the US within the next few weeks (our biggest trading partner). Even if we wanted to let the economy rip we literally cannot because the world economy all countries rely on would not allow us to.
You are right about alot of Americans losing their jobs due to the government, but not because of the shutdown orders. It is due to the government failing to act from Jan 3 forward when they were warned the single biggest threat to the US was Coronavirus and they chose to do nothing about it.
Historically only one strategy has ever worked against dangerous infectious diseases. Identify, test, trace, quarantine.
You have to identify the disease, you have to quickly test for it among your population, you have to trace its spread, and you have to quarantine anyone who has it as well as anyone who has come into contact with those who have it. The US managed to go 1/4 - ok for a baseball player, not good enough to fight a dangerous disease. We did identify it pretty quickly. Didn't have it completely mapped but knew enough to know what family of disease it is. But we didn't test at all, we didn't trace at all, and because we didn't do those 2 we were not able to quarantine at all. Those missteps put the government in a spot where it literally had no other choice. The only thing the government could have done would have been to implement even stricter mitigation policies like some European countries did (and Australia and New Zealand).
The mitigation measures have bought us time, but have not solved the problem, nor were they designed to. For the last 2+ weeks we have been able to keep the new cases relatively flat around 30K. But we haven't been able to get it to go below that level. Cases are a 2-3 week lagging indicator and deaths are a 3-4 week lagging indicator. If we are still avg 30K cases a day come May 1st we are in a heap of trouble as it means we haven't done good enough to not only 'flatten the curve' but to bend it back downward.
As Americans we need to understand what we are up against. We are likely going to be dealing with this significantly until at least the end of June.
Experts in last week survey conducted by UMass-Amherst believed we would likely be at around 50K deaths by the end of the month, Unless the current rate drops quickly we are going to easily pass that.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...eath-toll-will-hit-50000-by-the-end-of-april/
We are not out of this by a long shot and until we are our economy has little chance to get much better.
