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Comment by bla3 | Hacker News Reader

For perspective, numbers from the regular flu this winter: "At least 14,000 people have died and 250,000 have already been hospitalized during the 2019-2020 flu season, ..."

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Yes, and we can expect 10X to 20X that number at risk when this virus spreads.

Why stop at 10x or 20x? Why not 1,000x? What's the science behind that?

0.5% mortality vs 2-3.5% mortality, look the number of recovered cases is still small, so we can't actually count the in progress numbers just yet

Death rate of .1% for the flu and 1% for Corona.

2.5-3.5%? In China anyway.

For further perspective, Coronavirus' death rate is 10 to 40 times that of the regular flu. Of course, this number is an early estimate, but there is no doubt that this virus is much more dangerous than the flu.

The difference is we know what the flu can do and how bad it usually gets. And it's less lethal -- it's just more cases that's why there are lots more deaths with flu.

But that wont necessarily the case if there's a corona pandemic.

We don’t though. It varies wildly.

2018-2019 flu season saw 50 million infected and 80,000 deaths in the United States.

Are you comparing covid-19 cases against the sum of ALL cases of *regular flu(H_N_ influenza( A B C D) virus)?

For perspective, how many country will actually restrict travel or even undergone state wide lock down for an outbreak of regular flu??

Some worst possible case models predict 15 million people dying from this in the US; making it 1000x worse than flu in the worst case.

E.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f850n6/a_worst_cas...

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