Originally Posted by
stimpy
Removing the concern about the lives of 50m people for a minute and dispassionately looking at macro picture, 50m people die each year from auto accidents (so I've read recently) and the global population still increases. 50m is less than half of one percent of the global population, right? It is not something to be lightly judged in any case.
I don't want to get into a head to head.
I don't think this is less worrisome than before, what I do think is that we can slow it down massively to prevent infrastructure strain through extremely aggressive measures, especially if taken EARLY. If we don't, I personally think this will a humanitarian disaster, the scale of which we've not seen since WW2, and the true 'worst-case' scenarios would put it above WW2 by some margin.
And no, 50M don't die of auto accidents a year (it's about a million I believe, so still terrible). The TOTAL world-wide _all cause_ mortality is about 50M. If we assume a reasonable pandemic scenario, that 30% of the world will be infected in 'business as usual' (I think it would be more likely 50%, but let's be conservative), that would be 2.2B cases. Assuming 1% case-fatality rate would be 1%, that would be 22M deaths. But because of massive health-care infrastructure strain, and extrapolating what we're seeing e.g. in Italy, 2% is more realistic, with 44M deaths...and that's not adding into the equation that all-cause mortality from all other causes will also increase due to lack of health-care facilities.
tb