VIDEO: Coronavirus COVID19 vs Spanish Flu, MERS, SARS & Swine Flu

Pandemics Teach Us Actions Must Be Swift Because Predictions are Often Wrong

The graph is largely intended to explain the growth of the coronavirus COVID19 and put it in perspective against swine flu, MERS and EBOLA but in reality, it’s really not about coronavirus. this graph can be thought of as relating to any pandemic.

It easily explains how viruses can grow and spread in the global village that we all live in. Is important to be aware and concerned about these things but not panicky.

As we take a look at 90 days out we can see that the 2020 coronavirus AKA COVID-19 is a big deal But if we let this timeline continue to run you’ll see that the Swine flu, which I remember being something that people didn’t take it seriously as SARS and MERS probably because it Swine Flu stayed centered in China, became a much bigger deal.

These public health emergencies can be Easily related to grade 3 math. It’s all about the denominator and that means it’s all about the number of people who are infected.

The Spanish flu killed 1% of the people get infected and that was a very large percentage of the globe. Contrast that with MERS which killed about 10% of the people infected.  MERS was locked down fairly early and he did not get the global level of infection many of us feared.  So far COVID-19 AKA the coronavirus has been killing about 2% of the people infected according to official CDC reports not just the Chinese government. However, because it is estimated that only about 50% of people infected with coronavirus had any sort of meaningful symptoms, they will not likely be tested and not included in official statistics so it is quite likely Coronavirus will only killing about half the number we see reported today.  That puts near 1% which is the same as the Spanish flu.

Pandemics and all other medical emergencies will come and go, but the lessons learned with stay.   It is clear that China has been Draconian in some of his measures to contain this outbreak by quarantining the largest number of people in human history and by sealing up infected residential buildings, going so far as to weld the doors shut to seal in those living in the building.

However, the rest of the world will benefit from these measures if we learn from our history, reduce travel, invoke quarantines (even self quarantine) and stay rational during the inevitable future pandemics.

.