Quote:
Originally Posted by dreamingat30fps
Quote:
Originally Posted by mecheng77
If you are over 60, are overweight or have underlying medical conditions I would worry, if not 99% of the ppl that get it recover fine
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Sooooo... like over 70% of the US population should be worried. No biggie. |
As of now the case fatality rate is over 1%. Most believe it will dip under 1%, but until more evidence is available, we are currently sitting at a number over 1%. If it stayed at 1% that would make it 10X more deadly than the the flu on a normal to bad year (I am not talking about the 1918-1920 Spanish flu). But even that is misleading, because in many folks in which the infection is not fatal, they do become seriously ill and require hospitalization. Right now it is roughly 10% of the infections that seem to that require hospitalizations. These are massive numbers that are threatening and or are taxing and overwhelming our healthcare system.
When one thinks of this in scale of the entire naive population then numbers sound bad. Usually a bit over 7% of folks are infected with the flu on a given year. We are closing in on that number as a whole population in the US and in some places are above that number with no real end of the infection in sight. If we double, quadruple or more that number than the potential number of total infections, total hospitalizations, and more sadly serious morbidity and mortality also goes up as well. In addition, many folks are now showing lasting effects that may go on for weeks to months, and perhaps longer. This last point is a real concern.
It is definitely a weird virus with a sizable infected population that is asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic on one end and with serious outcomes and long term disease on the other end. It is definitely very sad and tragic and it is hard not see this suffering when you work in this area.