This is a seasonal respiratory disease. In all likelihood, it will kill 60,000 people.
We deal with this sort of thing annually with influenza, it kills around 60,000 people a year. While that is a lot of people, we don't do anything draconian. There needs to be some kind of balance between disease prevention, and quality of life. We make these choices all the time to create balance. We could ban junk food, or lower (and enforce) speed limits and save 100,000 lives easily.
I have seen some variation of that logic posted here, and it is bewildering. At first I doubted that some posters were actually nurses- it takes a certain amount of critical thinking ability and understanding of math to pass the NCLEX. But, it looks like some are. Though I haven't noticed any of them posting their experience in heavy Covid regions.
This is so wrong, it should not need explanation, but I will try.
For starters, comparing two things because of similar mortality to each other is a specious argument. You could just as accurately say that, best case scenario, Covid 19 will kill as many Americans in one short season as we lost during the Viet Nam war. Oddly, nobody advocating for reducing restrictions makes that comparison.
More important- Comparing Influenza to Covid 19, or putting them next to each other for "perspective" is like comparing a light drizzle to a tsunami based on my personal experience with them. I can go out in a light drizzle for an hour in a windbreaker, and only get a little wet. I can wear $800 worth of goretex for 5 minutes in a tsunami, and I will also get a little wet.
If somebody gets shot with a 9mm while wearing a body armor and only sustained a bruise, they don't then think a 9mm is pretty much like a bb gun.
Plenty of analogies- point is that if we somehow manage to keep the death rates similar, it will have been at the expense of the most massive mitigation effort in human history.
If you want to compare numbers, go with 60,000 vs 2,000,000. Notice the extra zeros. 2,000,000 is the absolute low end of the mortality estimate of what would have happened had we treated these two respiratory viruses as similar. I use this particular number because it was used by Trump and reported by Fox. Seems like most experts think it is a bit low, but I think it is a fine number for comparison.
When nurses here in any way compare, conflate, juxtapose, relate or whatever these two illnesses in any way other than the respiratory component, I do wonder if they actually believe it, or if it is simply for shock value. Either way, I wish it would act like an eject button when they post it. I don't mean that they should be ejected from this forum. I mean like in a cartoon, that when they hit "submit topic", they go sailing through the air.
