As I write this, my wife and I are still left with, what are we missing regarding the Chinese flu, corona virus, covid-19. As with any virus it will spread, look at the flu numbers every year and the millions of just Americans it infects. It also kills thousands per year in America.
We understand all of the things they want us to do. Social distancing, stay home etc to save lives because there is no “flu shot” for this virus. Currently there are 452,168 cases of the corona virus world wide.
The only thing I can do is compare previous information to get a view on what is going on. The last pandemic we experienced was 2009 swine flu. 60,800,000 million Americans contracted the swine flu with just about 12,500 deaths. Those numbers are based on a year. April 2009 to April 2010. Just under 20% of the population contracted the virus. If you average the infections over the course of a year, that is 5,066,666 people a month. Right now we are at 812 deaths with the corona virus and 60,653 infections.
The first case of the swine flu was reported in the U.S. in April 2009. President Obama declared a national state of emergency October 24, 2009. China reported to the World Health Organization the corona virus as an epidemic on December 31 2019. President Trump initiated his travel ban on January 31st 2020. The national state of emergency was declared on March 13th 2020.
In looking at the information I compiled, the corona virus is more infectious versus the swine flu 1.46% to 2.25%, so again, I get the a stay home, no travel restrictions. The World Health Organization estimates that 290,000 to 650,000 die each year from the flu. Again the flu. In 2017-2018 in the United States there were roughly 61,000 deaths from the flu. The CDC considers flu season from October until February, that would be an average of 12,200 deaths per month during the “season”. We have 819 deaths from the corona virus to this point in the U.S. 20,494 total in the world.
Here is my take. The media has been blowing this up since it’s inception. I seem to be missing something, numbers don’t add up. Why the panic this time? There was no panic in 2009. There is no response like this every flu season with the amount of people that die. It seems to me that if you take these numbers from the CDC and extrapolate them out to one year, we seem to be ahead of the curve.