The only thing we'll agree is that the current situation is bad. Do you actually think you thought about those consequences but people who deal with these regularly didn't? I'm sure they take into much more than you think.
One last time, it's not as the flu. It's significantly worse, those who get in the hospital are worse and it's significantly more contagious. I'm talking about the cases that were know about, how many total asymptomatic cases matters just to calculate a total mortality but not how you address what you have in front of you.
The estimates are going down because measures are working.
And the last thing, you need to change your sources. How can you say the the places that got hit didn't go above capacity? You have no clue. Their ICU beds went up a ton, they are begging to get more staff. We are not talking about total number of beds.
I won't say the virus isn't a terrible thing and certainly people like yourself who work in hospitals are taking chances. I deeply respect and appreciate what you do. But I'm wondering whether it's more contagious? Until we test the general public, we won't know how many have been carriers with no or few symptoms (asymptomatic). I also question why there's little comparison in the news to seasonal flu. I believe part of that is that media sells better on bad news. It seems every upcoming storm is going to be the worst of the last century.
I checked the current figures for seasonal flu for the 2018-2019 season which runs 6 months from Oct- March approximately. Note that the numbers are larger than Covid-19, although the deaths will probably exceed flu by the time it's over. Additionally, the flu has a vaccine that was around 45% effective this season. In the 2018-2019 season in prevented 4 millions cases, 58,000 hospitalizations and 3500 deaths. (20% of the cases and 10% of the deaths which says something about whether to take the vaccine, but that's another story.) Additionally, over 99% of flu cases are susceptible to four different antiviral drugs. So the cases and deaths would have been a higher except for drugs and vaccines. I don't know how many lives the 4 anti-viral drugs save. But I'm sure the information is in the links somewhere; you can check.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.htmlNone of this is to diminish the threat of Covid-19. But it's important to put it in the context of other viruses that hit us every year. Shutting down the economy causes deaths and medical challenges such as starvation, suicide, mental issues, homelessness, marital breakups, educational deficiencies, loss of savings and jobs, drug and alcohol addiction, reduction of care for other diseases that aren't being addressed and deaths caused from that, etc. We have to be cautious that we don't over react. Otherwise the cure might be worse than the disease.
"CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza" (By comparison, there are currently 633,267 cases and 28,278 deaths from Covid 19).
"Antiviral medications are an important adjunct to flu vaccine in the control of influenza. Almost all (>99%) of the influenza viruses tested this season are susceptible to the four FDA-approved influenza antiviral medications recommended for use in the U.S. this season.
