Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says

Re:Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says by BlargMcLarg on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @01:39PM (#22548014)

Except the statistics have been so wildly different across sources it'd be very unwise to follow any of them, and instead check the stories where possible. Only yesterday someone posted the accounts of people in Italy being overwhelmed. Last time I checked, a regular flu doesn't smash through a hospital's capacity so hard they have to ask doctors to change focus.

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Re:Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says by wool_gather on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @02:20PM (#22548636)

I think you're referring to a Twitter thread where a doctor relayed descriptions of hospital conditions from another doctor in Lombardy. It was a horrifying story (and scared me, I admit), but I would suggest caution.

Unless there's information that's not making it out of Italy, the death statistics reported today don't seem to align with the picture painted by those tweets.

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Re:Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says by abstractbarista on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @01:47PM (#22548157)

The thing is, that infrastructure already prepared yearly for the flu. They have capacity designed around it. It is "normal" for thousands to die from the flu yearly, and nobody says anything. (Except that you should obviously be vaccinated.)

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Re:Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says by tigershark on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @02:46PM (#22548952)

If this will reach the same infection numbers as the flu the deaths in US would be many millions. Do you think that it’s the same thing?

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Re:Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says by mcguire on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @03:15PM (#22549338)

There were an estimated 44,000,000 flu cases in the US in 2017-2018. Assuming a worst-case-with-current-data death rate of 3.5%, that's about 1,500,000 deaths. Not millions.

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