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Past Pandemics.

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Id82:
So now that this coronavirus has shut everything down through out the world. I was looking into past pandemics and was shocked to see that the H1N1 pandemic aka swine flu from 2009 infected 700 million to 1.9 billion people. With between 150 to 500 thousand fatalities. 125 thousand dying in the US alone. Now as of today Covid-19 has infected 280 thousand people with nine thousand deaths world wide and it has the potential to be as bad as the swine flu. My question is how come the world didn't come to a screeching halt with the swine fu pandemic. I had no idea it was that bad. I remember hearing about it on the news a lot and the news sensationalized the hell out of it. But I had no idea that many people died from it. Why didn't the world go into hoarding supplies, hunkering down and causing the economy to crash over that pandemic? I guess I'm just trying to look at things in perspective because the world is in a scary uncertain place right now.

dpareja:
You're off on the US deaths by a factor of ten, about 12,500 per the CDC.

And I think this is at least in part to do with incompetent governmental responses.

I'd be interested in seeing the data on SARS infection and mortality rates at this point in its spread. Comparing the final totals for SARS to the current totals for COVID-19 is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Id82:
The sars outbreak spread to 29 countries with only a total of 8 thousand ninety six cases and Seven hundred and seventy four deaths. That's a 9.5% mortality rate. That outbreak started in November 2002 and flattened around June 2004. Yet that one came to a stop and I remember hearing a lot about it in the news, but the world didn't go into a panic over it. South park even made fun of the epidemic in an episode.

Vanto:
Deadlier diseases generally don't spread as much, especially nowadays.

Also, I'd like to take a moment to recommend China Uncensored's videos about the Wuhan coronavirus. The CCP's attempts to disavow responsibility and spin things in their favor are as repugnant as they are blatant.

Sigmaleph:

--- Quote from: Id82 on March 19, 2020, 10:44:42 am ---So now that this coronavirus has shut everything down through out the world. I was looking into past pandemics and was shocked to see that the H1N1 pandemic aka swine flu from 2009 infected 700 million to 1.9 billion people. With between 150 to 500 thousand fatalities. 125 thousand dying in the US alone. Now as of today Covid-19 has infected 280 thousand people with nine thousand deaths world wide and it has the potential to be as bad as the swine flu. My question is how come the world didn't come to a screeching halt with the swine fu pandemic. I had no idea it was that bad. I remember hearing about it on the news a lot and the news sensationalized the hell out of it. But I had no idea that many people died from it. Why didn't the world go into hoarding supplies, hunkering down and causing the economy to crash over that pandemic? I guess I'm just trying to look at things in perspective because the world is in a scary uncertain place right now.

--- End quote ---

Given those numbers, the worst case scenario for swine flu (high end of deaths, low end of infected) is a fatality rate of 0.07% (using numbers i found in Wikipedia it's a little higher, at 0.08%). That's comparable to regular flu (not to minimise it; flu kills a lot of people and having an extra flu-like disease going on is still pretty bad)

WHO were talking about a fatality rate for covid-19 of 3.4%. There is evidence now that this was inflated, because serious cases are more likely to get detected than milder ones, and testing rates in many parts of the world have been abysmal. But they are still talking about something in the neighbourhood of 1%, an order of magnitude more serious than swine flu.

This is a somewhat unfair comparison; people who were worried about swine flu as it happened did not know how bad it was going to be. It's harder to find out what the estimates were back then (and I am lazy) but one thing I noticed is that the R0 of the swine flu virus was estimated as 1.4-1.6 not long after the initial outbreak while current estimates for SARS-CoV-2 are between 1.4 and 3.9.

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