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A comment on U.S. field hospitals stand down, most without treating any Covid-19 patients. Parent comment

Re:U.S. field hospitals stand down, most without treating an... by tynpeddler on Friday May 08, 2020 @10:06PM (#23121566)
I always emphasize to my family that we shut down the whole country, the outbreak was relatively well contained to a few areas, and it has still almost certainly already killed more than 100,000 people and may well kill over 200,000.

Given our extreme response, the high death toll should be more shocking to people.

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Re:U.S. field hospitals stand down, most without treating an... by greedo on Friday May 08, 2020 @10:33PM (#23121707)
And we're not even close to the end of this. If the IFR holds up at what we're seeing, we already have another 50K deaths that will happen in the next few weeks.

Then the math gets really ugly. If herd immunity requires north of 60% to have been infected, that means 197M Americans. Of those 197M, roughly 5% will require hospitalization, and 1% will die. That equates to 10M hospitalizations and 1.9M deaths. Even being generous and lowering the IFR to .1%, means 190K deaths. Now this make be spread out over the next 7 months, but the butcher's bill will be paid. Hopefully we'll get a vaccine by then, or some therapeutic drugs, but I'm not optimistic.

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