Would you please be able to expand on the 'seasonal flu' point you made?
A study from Santa Clara just recently found that there are probably 50 to 85 times MORE infections than originally thought, just that the vast majority of them were asymptomatic.
Should we be focusing our energy on protecting our elderly and immunocompromised? Yes, absolutely.
Should we be mandating that people stay home, putting millions of perfectly healthy people out of work? It's absolutely insane to me that this was even considered, let alone implemented.
The flu and vaccine point is also well taken. For the entirety of human history the flu was a health risk for the elderly and life expectancy [excluding under 5s] was 60-70 [1]. The contemporary expectation that everyone should make it into their 80s and 90s is a strong outlier.
OTOH, people counter by pointing out that NYC is already at 0.16 [14000 / 8400000] fatality rate [2], and it's unclear how many more until this wave recedes. Then anecdotes about dead healthcare workers, reinfections, mutation rates, etc.
[0] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...
[1] https://www.quora.com/Excluding-child-mortality-what-is-the-...
[2] https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Track...
I don't. Do you? We are 3 months into this mess and have wildly divergent facts that can't be reasonably reconciled.
Some attempts:
* The regular flu season uses 75% capacity of the system. A disease that's 3x worse will lead to 225% capacity needs.
* Maybe this disease is remarkably more contagious than the flu. In a tightly packed place like NYC, you might get all the cases that you're ever going to get flowing through the system within x weeks, whereas a less infectious flu season might trickle the same caseload within 2x weeks.
* This is out of the ballpark deadly, 10x-100x worse than the flu.
Besides, many strains of flu has a vaccines available. Nothing of that sort exists for corona.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.ht...
Vaccines existing for the flu is the point, COVID is way less deadly considering we don't_ have a vaccine.
"The city has added more than 3,700 additional people who were presumed to have died of the coronavirus but had never tested positive."
I suppose the New York Times is propoganda? I know Donald Trump would agree with that statement...
Paraphrasing mostly, but this is Dr. Birx admitting that the government is overreporting by default. So even if you exclude NYC, it doesn't change my point.
Similarly if you have type 1 diabetes and you get infected with corona, you probably died with diabetic complications, but without corona you would have been totally fine.
Not sure how that doesn't change your point. In fact you are conflating two different things. On one hand you are arguing about overreporting and on the other hand don't even want to take into consideration common practices in disease statistics. Almost makes me think you are not arguing in good faith.
We need detailed demographics of infections and deaths. We need to break down the risks, because a blanket totalitarian response of "SHUT DOWN LITERALLY EVERYTHING" is absolutely ridiculous when the general population is going to be fine. We didn't shut down the world economy for SARS, H1N1, MERS or any particularly bad flu season and we shouldn't shut down for this. We should focus our limited resources on protecting the vulnerable and let everyone else get back to work. More lives will be destroyed from an extended shutdown than this virus ever could.