Adding on to Duck07's link, here's a study done by English researchers at Imperial College that said in an unmitigated epidemic (i.e. in which we didn't do anything to stop it), they projected "approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality."lukeyrid13 wrote:I'm not trying to argue or anything, I legitimately want to have a discussion about it since I seem to be in the minority with my personal perceptions...
Do you have link showing potentially 1.5 million deaths?
Infection and death rates in: China, South Korea and Japan are all slowing. The total number of present cases pales in comparison to that of flu/influenza. The mortality rate is higher, I won't dispute that but the prevalence, at least for now is nowhere close.
The flu this year: (USA only)
- 29 million infected
- 280k hospitalized
- 16k died
Maybe the lesson is we should take the flu more seriously but the snowball effect of shutting down the world just doesn't compute for me personally yet.
More importantly, they also estimated that if we only tried to quarantine sick people but didn't implement population-wide social distancing measures, "the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US."
The UK abandoned their "build up herd immunity" strategy in part based on those findings.