Quote Originally Posted by dankrutka View Post
One thing you can count on is BoulderSooner claiming facts from thread to thread without any sources... and they are almost always wrong. First, we don't know the exact mortality rate. Even if it was 0.6 then that would be six times as deadly as the flu. However, most reports believe this is way too low. I've seen 1.4 mortality rate as a conservative estimate, which is 14 times the mortality. There are far higher mortality rates than these in several of the hard hit countries, but we're still learning about why. Unlike Boulder, I won't claim to know something experts are still trying to figure out.

An important thing to understand is that if this continues to spread our health care infrastructure will be so overwhelmed that people will start dying of other things too because they can't get care.

For people playing this down I'm curious how they think we're different from Italy, which is in absolute crisis? To me, we're less prepared than almost all these other countries and handling it far less effectively.
This availability of care is the big thing that concerns me. I read this yesterday - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...YYnxNrQTKJ_id8

This could happen quickly here. Even if hospitals don't run out of beds, there will likely be shortages of beds in ICUs and shortages in equipment like respirators. It won't just be the folks with Covid that suffer but all the folks with other life threatening health issues who suddenly lose when you have to make care decisions based on limited availability of resources and the hard math of potential outcomes. THIS is why this is scaring the crap out of me.