Every cloud has a silver lining :)
>Is blue cross going to have the resources to pay for all those extra hospital visits?
If the government ends up bailing them out this could be a step towards single payer health care in the US.
Median ages:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world...
Countries in the West over 40 at the median:
Germany, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Portugal, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, Czech, Finland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Romania, Denmark, Poland, Canada, Slovakia, France, Belgium, Ukraine, Sweden, Belarus, UK, Russia
Germany has half its 83 million population over 48 years of age. Italy is the 5th oldest country at the median. Covid will hit very hard against older populations.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
edit: probably also rationing: Canned goods are starting to look a bit bare at our local supermarket in Florence, about 200km from Italy's COVID19 cases. https://twitter.com/JacekWork/status/1231900845802954757
edit-2: Residents in Milan, Italy have raided the grocery stores as panic about COVID19 and city lockdowns sets in. https://twitter.com/RuralCdn/status/1231969752890957824
That 30 million dead, and probably another 300 million hospitalized and maybe 50 million that need icu care.
Should probably go without saying that we don’t have the ICU beds to handle that in the western world, let alone in developing countries.
We also haven’t had anything like the Spanish flu in the US since we’ve had the modern health insurance system. Is blue cross going to have the resources to pay for all those extra hospital visits? What about all the long term side effects from the millions of people that had acute respiratory failure and survived.
edit:
Also something else to consider -- what if this goes epidemic in the US during the elections this year? They'll have to cancel rallies, campaign events, maybe even the party conventions.