General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How can a disease with a 1% mortality rate shut down the U.S? Answered by Franklin Veaux: [View all]TheRickles
(2,289 posts)1% is in the ballpark of what is being reported for the case fatality rate (CFR) of Covid. This means that 1% of the people who get Covid die, not that 1% of the total population dies. So the question is, What % of Americans get Covid? That number is hard to pin down, especially since so few people are getting tested. In MA, where I live, we've had 100k confirmed cases in a population of 7 million, which is about 1.5% of the population.
8000 deaths have been reported out of those 100k Covid cases so far in MA, which comes to a little over 0.1% of the state's total population (that's an 8% CFR, higher than elsewhere). Because of the possibility that many people who die with Covid did not die from Covid (ie, they had other significant illnesses), these percentages aren't totally exact at this stage of the game.
In other words, Covid mortality may only be about 1/10 as bad as being projected in this post. That's still obviously very bad, but even if many more people die in the months ahead, the mortality rate will be nowhere near the 1% of the total population as described by Mr. Veaux and the OP. The situation will get clearer as we continue to learn more about what's happening, but it doesn't appear to be on course to be the full-blown catastrophe being described here.