The Covid-19 Info thread (keep politics out please)

[Johnson85]

Idk how you define disaster. Guess Korea, Nam, Iraq, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, etc don't count. Normandy or bust.

It's a little different comparing emergent diseases and wars or acts of war. We very likely have a new disease that's just going to be part of our disease burden going forward and it has a IFR somewhere in the range of .3%. That's extremely bad. It's probably going to show up in life expectancy numbers, although not as much as you'd think because so many of the deaths are with people that likely would have died within a year anyway. It will probably be COVID and Flu season going forward, and that's a significant drain on quality of life. That could fairly be called a disaster, but I would resist that because people are using it as a reason to inflict a ton of avoidable and unnecessary harm. There are bad things that happen that are unavoidable and we shouldn't make things worse b/c we think there is always a silver bullet.

ETA: Also, while this is worse than vietnam b/c it will be an ongoing thing, 58k deaths of people of military age, many in their early twenties if not late teens, is a much bigger loss than we have suffered so far. It will probably not be worse by the time Wuhan works its way through the population unless we get an upside surprise, but as of right now, there's no question the toll of vietnam was worse.