Many More People Will Die from Covid 19 Than the Flu

Is it, one of the things that's come up about this is people are now aware, people like myself are aware of the number of people that die every year in the United States from the flu, which is staggering. It's a lot more than I ever thought before. You know, like, do you know the numbers? Like what? Yeah, so seasonal flu is really bad. It's, and it varies year to year, different variolence of the flu. So it usually goes between 12 and 50,000 people die every year of influenza. And the vast majority of those, by the way, are not vaccinated. So even in years where there's not a good match between the flu vaccine and the flu, it could still reduce your likelihood of hospitalization and death. So that's an important message to get out. The numbers here, unfortunately are looking worse. Can I pause you for a second? How does that work? How, even if it's not matched up to the correct seasonal flu, how does it prevent you from being hospitalized? Because it's partially protective. So if you imagine a virus that has all of these different pieces to it and all the antibodies, each reacting to a different piece of the virus, in a perfect match, all of the antibodies target the virus in a less than perfect match. Only some of the antibodies target the virus and therefore it's partially protective and can have a partial effect. And so, I was going to say, oh, so the, and now the numbers of Americans who are dying are all over the map. So if you believe the numbers saying that they're between four and 10 times the number of Americans, I forget about America, four to 10 times COVID, the SARS-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is four to 10 times more lethal than regular flu. So that'll give you the bracket. So the minimum is 12,000 from flu. The minimum that's going to die from COVID-19 is around 50,000. And at the high end times 10 could be between 500,000. So that's where you're hearing those numbers from the White House press conference saying maybe 100 to 200,000 Americans could die. I think it's probably, I like the Institute for Health Metrics numbers that just came out. They say 84,000 Americans will die in that peak season going from April, May, May and June. And then, but we don't know what'll happen again in the out year. So the point is a lot of Americans are going to die. I'm hoping it doesn't get as high as 200,000. And again, the modelers are really looking at this. The way those numbers that I gave you that estimate was a sort of simplistic version. There's much more sophisticated models, but again, they're models based on assumptions and with the new virus pathogen, it's hard to get all the assumptions right. But the point is many more people will die of this virus than even in a bad flu season.