If everyone in the US got it, a 2 percent death rate would mean about 6.6 million deaths. More than the Holocaust.
I believe the percentage that ends up in serious to critical condition is around 20 percent. That's 66 million. Imagine the economic devastation of tens of millions of people missing weeks of work, then being financially decimated by a long hospital stay.
Yeah. It's kind of a big deal.
Like I said earlier, I have been in the middle of it since really mid-Dec. I think I am seeing the tail end of it here. The gov't needs to take some drastic measures if they are to contain it. It is a tough call -- balance between economic impact and the actual health impact. We will head into a recession as the street and shopping malls are half empty. The govt is giving some money/grants to tie the businesses over.
There are zero fatalities here so far though we have a migrant worker from Bangladesh who is not responding to any of the current treatments. But infants have been admitted and quarantined and yet been discharged which is somewhat surprising as I would have thought a 1-week old baby would be highly vulnerable.
The politicians here were useless in that they should have banned flights coming in from China early on before it became a complex web (the calculate is that a person meeting or is contact like 14 people a day, but I think this number varies from country to country) -- from a tendril/strand from China. But they didn't want to upset the Chinese leadership and the potential economic impact that it will have.
What has worked really well is due to to the healthcare workers. 16hr shifts/stand-by for the past couple of months, locking down hospitals with only one entry in and out, monitored 24/7. (There were cases of even the head of the A&E being and countless nurses quarantined here.)
Hospital systems/procedures hygiene has to be 100% and the doctors here have used a concoction of treatments to manage the problem.
From the containment side, they have sent home thousands of people (incl healthcare workers) who have had shown flu symptoms. Home lockdowns.
Home lockdowns are where the patients are not allowed to leave their homes for a couple of weeks. There will be uber/home delivery food delivery services already set up, daily care packages (like snacks, masks, sanitisation products etc ) sent, daily random checks to ensure that they are at home or there will be fines.
Lessons learnt from the SARs epidemic 17yrs ago. Thank god for institutional memory.