[ISiddiqui]

Here is a good article I came across:

https://www.fast.ai/2020/03/09/coron...BjIo5Q_ZvwiSRU

The flu has a death rate of around 0.1% of infections. Marc Lipsitch, the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard, estimates that for covid-19 it is 1-2%. The latest epedemiological modeling found a 1.6% rate in China in February, sixteen times higher than the flu1 (this might be quite a conservative number however, because rates go up a lot when the medical system can’t cope). Current best estimates expect that covid-19 will kill 10 times more people this year than the flu (and modeling by Elena Grewal, former director of data science at Airbnb, shows it could be 100 times more, in the worst case). This is before taking into consideration the huge impact on the medical system, such as that described above. It is understandable that some people are trying to convince themselves that this is nothing new, an illness much like the flu, because it is very uncomfortable to accept the reality that this is not familiar at all.

For each person that has the flu, on average, they infect 1.3 other people. That’s called the “R0” for flu. If R0 is less than 1.0, then an infection stops spreading and dies out. If it’s over 1.0, it spreads. R0 currently is 2-3 for covid-19 outside China. The difference may sound small, but after 20 “generations” of infected people passing on their infection, an R0 of 1.3 would result in 146 infections, but an R0 of 2.5 would result in 36 million infections! (This is, of course, very hand-wavy and ignores many real-world impacts, but it’s a reasonable illustration of the relative difference between covid-19 and flu, all other things being equal).

Hopefully this "it's just the flu" stuff disappears. However, we need the administration to step up for that to happen, but I don't see that happened .