What is the mortality rate of one of the more severe stains of the common cold or the flu? I'm sure we've had one of those that got to 0.5% or more in recent history?
Does that mean 0.5% is too low to shut everything down?
Does that mean 0.5% is too low to shut everything down?
One of the more severe strains of the flu? 10% globally (1918 H1N1 pandemic flu, estimated 500 million infected, 50 million killed), about 2% in the US.
> I'm sure we've had one of those that got to 0.5% or more in recent history?
No, and certainly not one that also was a global pandemic. I mean, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic swine flu had, in the US, about 0.02% mortality. Typical seasonal flu has a 0.1% mortality rate. The common cold is a syndrome caused by a variety of viruses (mostly rhinoviruses, but I think the next most common are coronaviruses.) If we had a relative of one of those that produced serious health impacts with any frequency, we wouldn't call it the common cold, but, e.g., COVID-19.
> Does that mean 0.5% is too low to shut everything down?
The mortality rate alone is not the measure. You need to consider the health system burden per infection (because if you saturate that system, mortality goes up, and not just for the infection causing the above-normal saturation.) And you need to consider how infectious the disease is, and what the transmission vectors are. And you need to consider the incidence of severe-but-nonfatal effects.
Second, basically everyone except small children has had the flu, and has some immunity to it, while we're all "immunologically naive" vis-a-vis SARS-CoV-2.
With adults, flu and COVID-19 are different: they have encountered the flu before, so it doesn't rampage through a population. COVID-19 does.
In other words: for flu, we basically have achieved some level of herd immunity already.
0.02% of school age children ... yeah, that indeed rounds to zero ... it also rounds to 14-15k dead children.
Covid-19 also is substantially more transmissible than flu.
There is nothing since 1918 that is comparable to where we are now, at least within the US context. Even the polio outbreaks (where in schools, movie theaters, pools and other features were shutdown to protect kids) don't really compare.
Just wanted to point that out since the way you worded your comment could lead people to believe that it was closer to 0.5%
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n...
> It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.
That'd be a 10% IFR.
That may be the case; the places I've seen it cited it's clearly a US number, and it's usually alongside global infections and deaths, but the denominator of the US number has generally not been clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic#Compar...