I’ve seen several people compare COVID-19 to the flu, often accompanied with bad information, mostly downplaying the severity of this crisis, and brushing off the absolute necessity of dramatically reducing our contact with each other.
Unlike the flu, noone has resistance or immunity to any strain of COVID-19 yet, which is one reason it’s spreading very fast. It’s also several times deadlier than the flu. The flu kills about 0.1% of those it infects. The best estimates, so far, of the rate of death for COVID-19 are between 0.7% and 3.5%. The flu kills tens of thousands in the US each year, in spite of widespread resistance. Without aggressively and preemptively quarantining ourselves, COVID-19 is expected to infect half the population. Given the average rate people die from this disease, if left to infect half the US or more, over a million people could die from it in the next year. The flu is no joke. COVID-19 is even worse, and therefore needs to be taken very seriously. The faster we respond, the fewer people will be infected and die, and the better care those who are infected will get from hospitals, since there are a finite amount of resources available at any hospital.
Italy’s a worst case scenario for hospital overload, given how fast COVID-19 was allowed to spread. They didn’t contain it quickly enough, so now their health system is severely overloaded. The World Health Organization rated their health system as the second most capable in the world, yet now in many places there are more than twice the number of critically-ill people than hospital beds available. Only a fraction of those infected are receiving the care they need. Containment and quarantine procedures have been even slower here in the US, and the WHO ranks our health system as 37th. We are grossly unprepared for an Italy-level outbreak.
If we had begun testing and quarantining when we should have, we might not have to resort to so many closures, cancelations, and quarantines. As a best case example, even though it’s literally a city (meaning there are a lot of people in a relatively small amount of space), Hong Kong did everything as well as possible, so very few people have been infected so far, and their hospitals aren’t strained. As soon as the virus was announced, and it was known to have originated from a particular province in China, they began testing and quarantining everyone who had recently traveled in from Hubei province, and tried locating everyone who had come into contact with them, and quarantined them as well. The people of Hong Kong began self-quarantining immediately, too, and the Hong Kong government eventually issued strict quarantine rules. Because of that, there are still fewer than 150 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections in the country, and infections of all communicable diseases have dropped. Very few people will die from this disease there, even though cities are one of the places most at risk for mass infection. Here, instead, the White House refused to do more than contain the spread, for weeks after a containment strategy was useful, and even refused to test and quarantine dozens of infected or likely-infected people traveling in from known infected areas, so now the infection is likely everywhere in the country, and we need to take extreme measures to contain the spread.
There are several actions we, communally, can take right now to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The most important one is simply reducing how much we’re around other people, especially large groups of people. And when we do need to go out (as most of us have to for work—at least until Congress is able to pass a bill guaranteeing paid sick leave, if not also rent relief), we should wear a mask (obtain one if you don’t have any yet), use appropriate hand sanitizer after touching things, and wash our hands very well whenever possible.
Doing these will “flatten the curve” from a sharp and large spike of infections, to a longer but smoother hill of infections, ultimately:
reducing the total number of people who get infected, and therefore are subject to lasting harm (there are reports of permanent lung damage), or death
giving hospitals a better chance to respond adequately, by having to deal with fewer patients at a time
giving labs more time to develop a vaccine or cure, further reducing transmission, harm, and death
We’re all in this together.