Look, CoVid-19 is filling ICU’s with highly contagious patients who are infecting, and sometimes killing, many caregivers (including even EMT’s). Can you honestly say that the same thing, only worse, routinely happens every year due to influenza? Seriously?
No, the virus probably won’t kill as many people in the U.S. this year as the flu, but maybe only because massive resources have been devoted to figuring out how to stop it or slow it down and render it less deadly. Hopefully, that is now happening, because if it doesn’t we will lose a more doctors and nurses as the virus hits one city after another.
I wish I didn’t have to crush this stupid WSJ article multiple times every day. The authors should have their licenses revoked.
This was not a research study, it was an editorial in a newspaper. The authors think it is rational to extrapolate the incidence of the Covid19 virus in Vo, Padua, Italy, population about 3,000, to the entire province of Padua, Italy, population 990,000. They do not mention that the reason the entire population of Vo was tested is because that is the town where the FIRST PERSON DIED IN ITALY from the disease. You could extrapolate the .9% infection rate of Vo to Greenland and find a theoretical mortality rate of zero since no one has died in Greenland of the disease. It is unreasonable to expect that the incidence of the disease in the “hotspot” where the first person died is not much higher than in areas where no one has died.