I want to share your optimism and I hope you’re right. However, flu viruses are already all over the world to the point that they can predict where they will go. This virus is new and not yet everywhere.
Also, if 56,000 die per year from the flu or so, that’s in 12 months. We had over 3,000 deaths in two months in China alone. And mostly only in one province. That’s a super small territory compared to the globe. So this has the potential of being insanely destructive. Millions of people dead if not contained.
Finally, we are reading direct statements from actual health officials and leaders. Not from the media. I mean we are hearing from the CDC that the elderly should self-isolate a bit, etc. And regions are shutting down schools and mass events. That’s not the media creating that.
What I am thinking is that Hubei province has a population of about 58 million, just a little bit less than the UK as a whole.
Wuhan is probably similar to London as compared to the UK, with a population of about 9 million in central Wuhan, same as London, UK.
And what we can see for the Wuhan/Hubei figures is a curve that's only occurred in that way due to extreme social distancing measures (almost total lockdown and almost every household barely leaving the house other than for shopping once or twice a week).
So, does that mean that epidemiologically, Wuhan/Hubei could be an approximate model for what might happen as far as spread/cases in London and the greater UK?
And Hubei has had about 80 thousand cases even with the severe lockdown. We are unlikely to have such severe measures here, due to us not being a communist country, and because we don't want a double peak with the second peak occurring during the next winter flu season.
Yeah, it might be like having the flu for the vast majority of people. But on the larger level, this does have the
potential to be quite a serious epidemic.
Even the relatively low (compared to the overall population) figure of 80,000 confirmed cases, if that happened in the UK over a three month period, would cause struggles in the hospitals. It's not something to take too lightly on that level, even if for most people it will be about as bad as the flu, or maybe not even that bad.
It's not going to wipe out 60% of our population like the Black Death. But it can still cause significant difficulties even with a 1% death rate across all age groups.