Looking at yesterday misses the point. Look at tomorrow!

Don't look at the lit fuse. Look at the bomb it leads to.

NYC death numbers double in under 2 days now.

You can use the same argument for flu deaths, heart disease deaths, diabetes deaths, etc. The numbers that you pay attention to are dependent on what is popular right now.

The difference is the rate of those aren't doubling every three days.

Hmm. This comment got me curious.

Using CDC's FluView app I looked at the 2017/2018 flu season to see what the doubling time was. It's not 3 days indeed. It varied quite significantly during the outbreak, but there were periods where it was doubling approximately every week. Potentially faster I suppose depending on how closely people were looking for it (not that close if I understand correctly for most flus).

Viruses can grow pretty fast.

This is true and conceded, but that wasn't my argument.

It isn't the virus that is sanitizing people of their humanity. They lost their humanity a long time ago, and the virus is simply revealing their nature.

I wrote a comment elsewhere about death rates in the US. 81 people per day is not an astronomical number for the most densely populated part of the country, in fact it's well within the normal number of deaths according to CDC data. In fact, just compared to heart disease alone, it might be slightly on the lower end.

But of course heart disease isn't contagious and rapidly increasing. I think if it were, it would be far more concerning, wouldn't you agree?

The problem is, as bad as the current numbers are, without significant changes, they are inevitably going to get considerably worse quickly, as you can see from the graphs.

Imagine what'll happen if 60% of the US population gets this quickly (over the next 3 months say) and then 2% of those people die with another 8% in hospital...

A stable 80 deaths per day isn't that many, it's only 29,200 people per year.

But with covid-19 the numbers of people dying is doubling every 3 days.

80, 160, 320, 640, 1280, 2560, 5120, 10,240, 20,480

Potentially Covid-19 would hit that 29200 figure in about 25 days from today.

Keep extrapolating and you'll find 2.5 trillion people will be dead just a week after that.

Look at Italy; look at Spain. These are not unreasonable extrapolations.

Neither of them have exponential growth. The rate of growth has steadily decreased after the first initial spike of cases.

The growth seems to be tapering off after extreme lockdown measures have been taken.

Of deaths? Here's Spain. They implemented lockdown on about the 7th of March.

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/

   8th   17 deaths
  11th   55 
  14th  196 
  17th  533
  20th 1093
  23rd 2311
  26th 4365

With the current rate it’s going to be 2500 death per day in 10 days.

This is absurd.