Seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands of people every year and we barely talk about that.
Out of cases that have been fully resolved we're now at an 8% mortality rate. 2% is counting ongoing cases, that's not the figure you should be looking at.
Additionally, it is widely acknowledged that the actual number of cases is undercounted, with the mildest cases less likely to have been tested and included in those numbers, again resulting in overly high numbers.
And finally, it would appear that Wuhan in particular is skewing the numbers higher, as being the site of the outbreak it was caught off guard and has struggled to manage the number of cases. Elsewhere in both China and the world, the death rate is far lower.
The estimate of 8% is unquestionably much too high. Exactly what the mortality rate is will still take more time to discover.
Malaria was responsible 405,000 deaths globally in 2018 according to [0].
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-m...
Malaria is not inherently a tropical region disease. It routinely plagued Europe until the 1950s. Russia for one example had a huge Malaria outbreak in the early 1920s as did Eastern Europe broadly.
"Gustavo Pittaluga (1876-1956) estimated that in 1923, 18 million people suffered from malaria in Russia, and that sixty thousand deaths occurred out of a total population of about 110 million (Anigstein, Pittaluga, 1925). Similar observations were made throughout the whole of eastern and south-eastern Europe and the former Ottoman Empire."
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104...
Europe and the U.S. used to have Malaria. The name -- bad air -- is Latin, the Romans thought it originated from bad swamp air. Shakespeare mentioned it time and time again in his plays.
I'm pretty sure what Shakespeare was referencing is a much more general idea prevalent in his day - that smells (not necessarily unpleasant ones) could be poisonous, and could be warded off by opposing "good" smells. This roughly coincided with an explosion of scented-good manufacturing as a cottage industry, although I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation ran there.
</digression>
2) Limiting chance of mosquitoes biting people (aircon)
3) Limiting the population with malaria (the fewer people with malaria, the less chance of a given mosquito biting someone with malaria and thus becoming a carrier)
...which actually isn't that far-fetched for a pre-medical society to conclude, given that mosquitoes breed in warm, still waters.
No. The name is Italian. It predates Italian colonies in the tropics. It's a disease which was endemic in marshlands believed to be caused by bad air Mal aria and was in Scotland amongst other places.
Malaria is not exclusively tropical. Nor is dengue or mosquito borne encephalitis. Tropical wet regions sustain mosquitos. So do cooler climates.
I agree that covid-19 seems to have a larger potential breadth, and didn't intend to downplay its significance.
Probably not. Case fatality rates don't accurately show the "deadliness" since many people have likely been infected but been asymptomatic or had mild illness that didn't cause them to seek medical advice.
> significant long term health consequences for many who survive
There is no evidence for that, and it doesn't make sense given the available data. Some number of people have long-term health consequences, and if you only compare that number to the number of people who went to hospital with serious illness, you might see a high percentage, but that's a huge distortion of reality.
We now have 4 independent estimates that place the Infection Fatality Ratio at about 0.5% to 1.7% which is between 5x and 17x deadlier than the flu (0.1%): https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1230977769795776512 Incidentally, this makes COVID19 comparable to the 1918 Spanish Flu (IFR ~2%) according to experts (see link above). And keep in mind the IFR, unlike the CFR, is the metric that takes into account undetected mild or asymptomatic cases.
«There is no evidence for that»
There is, see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... : In those who survive intensive care, [...] aberrant and excessive immune responses lead to long-term lung damage and fibrosis, causing functional disability and reduced quality of life.
I agree with this point but would also like to point out the possibility that way more people get infected by SARS-CoV-2 than the flu.
I also want to note that the flu also has the same asymptomatic or mild illness factor and that the deadliness would be only comparing people who sought medical treatment.
Also the comparison to the Spanish flu often ignores the fact that we are way better equipped to deal with the symptoms than in 1918.
Covid is very serious and we should not be complacent about it. But I think it's important to keep some perspective, especially since we seem to be on the brink of shutting down the entire global economy.
I'm not saying that we should not take covid very seriously. I'm just saying that before we allow it to shut down the global economy we ought to maintain some perspective on the magnitude of the risks society already faces year-in and year-out.