The "Bootleggers and Baptists" of the Coronavirus Crisis | Darren Brady Nelson

From the article: ‘Comparing the coronavirus’s death toll to that of related pandemics over the past one hundred years provides much-needed historical context for the outbreak. As of March 15, the death toll for coronavirus was 63 in the US and nearly 6,500 globally. However, death rates are unreliably high at 1.9 and 3.8 percent, respectively, because testing has so far been relatively low (and thus the denominator is unreliably small).’

Some statistics from the article:

1918 Spanish flu killed 40,000,000 worldwide and 600,000 US.

1968 Hong Kong flu killed 1,000,000 and 100,000.

2009 swine  flu killed 300,000 and 12,000.

As well world population was 2 Billion in 1918 vs 8 billion in 2020 making  rates of reduction in flu mortality all the more dramatic, declining from 160,000,000 per 8 billion in 1918 to 300,000 per 8 billion as of 2009, a 500-fold decrease.

By my arithmetic this means mortality declines by roughly half every ten years – in which case we might expect around 5,000 US deaths from coronavirus extrapolating from the 2009 swine flu figure.  While this is certainly most regrettable, it is  hardly catastrophic – and certainly nothing which can justify the hysterical level of government intervention.