Shore wrote:phatj wrote:The Spanish Flu infected about a quarter of the population of the entire world in 1918, killing at least 40M and possibly as many as 100M people, with a mortality rate of around 1-2%, putting it right around that of COVID-19.
Obviously, we're a long way from that, and medicine is vastly better today. On the flip side, it seems that COVID-19 can transmit before infected people show any symptoms, or at least any symptoms worse than those of the common cold. And for all the advances in medicine, we're not really equipped for a pandemic; the number of potential patients vastly exceeds the capacity of our hospitals and clinics even in the US, let alone less developed countries.
This could be really, really bad.
I don't think those numbers (mortality rate) are right, despite seeing them in a lot of places... I think the generally accepted facts are:
- World population was under 2 billion.
- About 500M people got sick.
- Somewhere between 35M and 100M people died
If that's true, the mortality rate (deaths/cases) is between 7% and 20%, not 1-2%. That's a massive difference, math-wise, on the potential devastation of a disease.
I think the reporting is confusing death/population with death/cases... somewhere between 2% and 5% of the population died, but only 1/4 of the population was sick.
Thanks for pointing that out.
