It's not at all absurd. Napkin math: 1% fatality rate * 60% infection rate * 7.8 billion people = 46.8 million deaths. You can plug in all sorts of adjustments, but millions is totally plausible.

Or another way to look at it is that the US could easily see 100k deaths. [1] The us is about 1/20th of the world population, so scaling up we get 2 million deaths.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/coronavirus-live-ne...

a world where we trust napkin math for fatality rates is a world i don't want to live in

(before you downvote, please appreciate the subtle dark pun)

The exponential growth can make it unintuitive but here are some numbers to consider:

In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798.

In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled.

So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this:

  In 5 days: 77,596
  In 10 days: 155,192
  In 15 days: 310,384
  In 20 days: 620,768
  In 25 days: 1,241,536

Unless things change really really quickly.

The current "best case" scenario of your government is 100k-240k dead; less than one order of magnitude is basically nothing in an exponential crisis. 240k to a million is just two doublings.

And there are 6.7 billion folks not in the US who all matter too.

how did you know my nationality? did you extrapolate the fact that i'm from the USA from my dumbass-ery?

because you're right and i respect your judgemental ability ;)

also: there are countries other than the United States.

Conjecture unproven before man.

Hate all you want, you know an American company will probably invent the vaccine.

and then an american will patent it and sell it for hundreds at the consumer level

god bless the us :')

I got a good laugh out of this.

thank you for being one out of exactly 10 people on HN with a sense of humor i appreciate you

Mitigations in the US are taking too long. A lot of people are going to die.

Yes.