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As a nurse, I encourage you to read and repost, and quote at length.

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How can a disease with 1% mortality rate shut down the United States?

Franklin Veaux - updated 6 hours ago, professional writer

There are two problems with this question.

1. It neglects the law of large numbers; and

2. It assumes that one of two things happen: you die or are 100% fine.

The US has a population of 328,200,000. If one percent of the population dies, that’s 3,282,000 people dead.

Three million people dead would monkey wrench the economy no matter what. That more than doubles the number of annual deaths all at once.

The second bit is people keep talking about deaths. Deaths, deaths, deaths. Only one percent die! Just one percent! One is a small number! No big deal, right?

What about the people who survive?

For every one person who dies:

• 19 more require hospitalization.
• 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives.
• 10 will have permanent lung damage.
• 3 will have strokes.
• 2 will have neurological damage that leads to chronic weakness and loss of coordination.
• 2 will have neurological damage that leads to loss of cognitive function.

So now all of a sudden, that “but it’s only 1% fatal!” becomes:

• 3,282,000 people dead.
• 62,385,000 hospitalized.
• 59,076,000 people with permanent heart damage.
• 32,820,000 people with permanent lung damage.
• 9,846,000 people with strokes.
• 6,564,000 people with muscle weakness.
• 6,564,000 people with loss of cognitive function.

That’s the thing that folks who keep going on about “only 1% dead, what’s the big deal?” don’t get.

The choice is not “ruin the economy to save 1%.” If we reopen the economy, it will be destroyed anyway. The US economy cannot survive everyone getting COVID-19.

THIS THIS THIS

And that’s not even talking about how many widows, orphans, and single parent families a 1% death rate will create.

How many more people are dying of non-covid illness because they’re either choosing not to get treatment or there aren’t any beds?

How many households are going to lose their primary breadwinner?

How many disabled people are going to lose their caretaker?

How many couples are going to divorce after losing a child?

How many senior citizens are going to have to move to a nursing home after losing their spouse, or their adult child?

And that’s just personal dynamics. Consider the social.

How many kids are going to drop out of high school rather than repeat a year?

How many kids won’t be going to college because they don’t feel safe on campus?

How many students are deciding against nursing school because they figured out long ago that no amount of clapping is worth getting assaulted by a maskless patent’s family demanding horse dewormer?

How many teachers saw parents spitting on their colleagues at PTA meetings and decided this was their last year in the classroom?

This isn’t something we bounce back from like a recession or a bank failure. This is an atom bomb: this is going to be felt for GENERATIONS.