And all this panic over an illness that's not statistically more dangerous than seasonal flu!
“Lies, damned lies and statistics!”
Whilst it is true to say that the CFR (Case Fatality Ratio) isn’t especially high at <1% of infections, it’s infection rate of 5.7x new infections per infection (a measure of contagiousness) is very high; unlike MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome; another Corona/SARS type virus) which had a mortality rate around ~34% of infections, but had very low Infection rate resulting in just 858 recorded deaths.
So it’s very small percentage of a very high number of infected people, resulting approximately 1.2 million deaths to date, which in my view makes Covid 19 some 1,400 times more dangerous than MERS
“Seasonal flu” is a rather generic term as it could easily cover a dozen or more ‘negative sense RNA [influenza] viruses (RNA is a single strand of the DNA helix), which also has a very high infection rate and low CFR, but the population is largely ‘asymptomatic’ meaning they already have some level of anti-bodies to fight the virus. Covid is a new virus which in which we are as a species yet to develop antibodies in the population sufficient enough level to disregard Covid as just one more “seasonal flu”
This has massive impact on healthcare as
@paul b has already eluded to and of course economic impact.
I count myself lucky not to have not had covid 19 myself, that I’m still relatively young and healthy and have a good chance of recovery should I become infected. I also think myself very lucky that I do not have to make decisions that effect millions of people, who as a group, no matter what I decide is the best course of action, trying to balance expert opinions on health and economics and trying to contain mass hysteria versus mass apathy, knowing full well that I’m dammed if I do and I’m dammed if I don’t.
Statistics don’t lie. They’re just very poorly understood.