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Comment by lazyasciiart | Hacker News Reader

How do you reconcile this argument with the hospitals being full and morgues overrun? Do you think that happens every flu season?

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[Not the person you addressed this question to].

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.

Those aren't reconciliations, they are contradicting the assertion that this is just another seasonal flu by identifying a way in which it is worse. I don't know what you mean about having "wildly divergent facts"?

Not all hospitals and morgues are overrun, a lot of them are actually massively under capacity. The media hysterics about this is complete nonsense for the majority of hospitals. NYC is not the US. Hell, NYC is not New York STATE.

How many hospitals or morgues should be overrun before it becomes evidence that we are not dealing with the same kind of problem as we do every flu season?

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