COVID-19 Pandemic - This is what a 99% survival rate looks like.

PROTIP: Press the ← and → keys to navigate the gallery, 'g' to view the gallery, or 'r' to view a random image.

How can a disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States? Franklin Veaux Updated 6h ago Professional Writer There are two problems with this question. 1. It neglects the law of large numbers; and 2. It assumes that one of two things happen: you die or you're 100% fine. The US has a population of 328,200,000. If one percent of the population dies, that's 3,282,000 people dead. Three million people dead would monkey wrench the economy no matter what. That more than doubles the number of annual deaths all at once. The second bit is people keep talking about deaths. Deaths, deaths, deaths. Only one percent die! Just one percent! One is a small number! No big deal, right? What about the people who survive? For every one person who dies: • 19 more require hospitalization. • 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives. • 10 will have permanent lung damage. • 3 will have strokes. • 2 will have neurological damage that leads to chronic weakness and loss of coordination. • 2 will have neurological damage that leads to loss of cognitive function. So now all of a sudden, that "but it's only 1% fatal!" becomes: • 3,282,000 people dead. • 62,358,000 hospitalized. • 59,076,000 people with permanent heart damage. • 32,820,000 people with permanent lung damage. • 9,846,000 people with strokes. • 6,564,000 people with muscle weakness. • 6,564,000 people with loss of cognitive function. That's the thing that the folks who keep going on about "only 1% dead, what's the big deal?" don't get. The choice is not "ruin the economy to save 1%." If we reopen the economy, it will be destroyed anyway. The US economy cannot survive everyone getting COVID-19.

View Gallery Random Image

Top Comments

Eldaln

Sep 15, 2020 at 01:15AM EDT in reply to Excitebot theLEGO

The fact that Americans have so quickly politicized the virus is mind-boggling to me. They managed to POLITICIZE a fucking virus.

The one thing everyone could agree is bad and the symbol they could use to rally behind a common goal, people used it to further cleave the country into a dumb left vs right argument. All of that to continue the "orange man bad" vs "muh triggered leftists" argument that has been going on there for 4 YEARS NON STOP.

From my European point of view, this is an incredible and hilarious shitshow

+70