I don't trust the numbers from Italy and China - Italy because they seem to have lost the control completely and there seems to be no proper testing of significant population or tracking of the infected patients, and China because...China.

So far, it seems Korea has the best data over the situation, and is likely the most applicable for countries with proper public health and medical systems.

Per Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare - http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/upload/viewer/skin/doc.html?fn=158337...

As of today, 150K people tested, 5766 infected, 35 death, 0.6% fatality rate. Their age distribution looks interesting:

0-30: ~2k infected, and no death.

30-50: ~1.5K infected, 2 death (0.1%)

50-59: 1127 infected, 5 death (0.4%)

60-69: 699 infected, 8 death (1.1%)

70-79: 288 infected, 13 death (4.5%)

80+: 127 infected, 7 death (5.6%)

Their number of infected graph is showing some sign of deceleration - the growth rate seems to be leveling off or slowing down slightly.

I think Italy is particularly worth paying attention to as a bad case approximation of what can happen in the US. About a week ago, Korea had tested 90k people while the US had 400 tests available and fewer tested.

Besides lack of testing, the US could turn out even worse than Italy given that many lack insurance and/or cannot afford to call in sick.

I'm growing tired of this meme.

Everybody in the US has insurance, that was literally a major point of contention to Obamacare - the left didn't like that the solution still used private insurers and the right didn't like that they were forced to buy something. If you have a low income, you get subsidized premiums.

For sick pay, it's just a lack of budgeting and planning. If you have a job that pays you $12/hr with no paid leave time or a job that pays you $10/hr with an accumulation of leave hours, it's still the same in the end if you work X days and are sick Y days and get a monthly income of $ZZZ, just in one case your employer is holding back your leave pay and in the other case you're paid full value up front and save for your leave period yourself.

> Everybody in the US has insurance

Isn't that factually wrong ?https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/number-americ...

> it's just a lack of budgeting and planning.

Which people living paycheck to paycheck can't do. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/nearly-half-american...

It is factually wrong. The correct way to phrase it would be that anyone can commit moral hazard and sign up for a public plan in response to a sudden need for medical treatment. So insurance can be available in a way that defeats the purpose of insurance systems.

However:

1) This is not free

2) This is not likely to save you from enormous medical costs

3) This is about on par with filing taxes. Probably easy to do if you understand the basics of whats going on, but few people do.

I'd love to see an age breakdown of infected from other countries, that alone could explain their lower fatality rate.

> I don't trust the numbers from Italy and China - Italy because they seem to have lost the control completely and there seems to be no proper testing of significant population or tracking of the infected patients

Based on what? Italy is the country that ran the third highest number of tests. Only China and South Korea ran more. [0]

I hope you don't imagine that the US is doing better than Italy, because you're in for a rude awakening.

[0]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/

I'm surprised how many people can compare it to the flu and be dismissive. If it was possible to catch "the flu" early and never have to deal with it, how much would that be worth? 30,000-60,000 people die every year just in the US and there are herculean efforts to produce, manufacture, and distribute a new vaccine twice a year. So now we're cool with having an additional flu going around?

That's separate from the concerns of too many people getting sick quickly, overwhelming our health system, so people who otherwise would get medical attention die.

There is a difference between "you know, we should try to do something about this" and the "OMG, the best-case scenario is that 10% of the population is dead in six months! We're all gonna die! Summon the army and weld people's doors shut!" that people carry on about here all day long.

>So now we're cool with having an additional flu going around?

When people use the word 'flu' they are often referring to the illness and not the virus. That is, there are several viruses that can cause 'flu-like' symptoms besides the influenza virus.

Without definitive evidence that the covid-19 is 'new', it is reasonable for people to wonder if some cases of the illness commonly referred to as 'flu' for the past 1000 years may actually have been caused by covid-19. In short, are we absolutely sure that there is some statistically signicant increase in the number of flu-like illnesses in the past three months?

I think it's pretty clear from the scientific data that the covid-19 virus is a recent zoonotic infection that jumped from bats to humans (with possibly another animal in between). How could it possibly have caused any human illness before that?

BTW, covid-19 is the disease (same as the flu). The virus is named SARS-Cov-2.

>I think it's pretty clear from the scientific data that the covid-19 virus is a recent zoonotic infection that jumped from bats to humans (with possibly another animal in between).

I know that's what most think. But, what is the evidence? If one were to test samples from 'flu' patients from the 1980s, how do we know one wouldn't find SARS-Cov-2 in some samples? Has anyone done this?

Merely finding similarities between the bat version and human version doesn't tell us anything about how long it's been in the human population. (For that matter, it doesn't tell us if the virus went from bat to human or human to bat... there are for more bats exposed to sources of human viruses than the other way around, you know...)