Well, have you all had enough of this so called virus that is going to kill us all?
The amount of people and companies that have all been brought into a state of fear and panic is unreal. With all of the past flu's that we have survived like SARS, H1N1, and so many others, what makes this one so special? It is said that there are approx. 700,000 people a year die from some flu virus flying around out there somewhere in the world. Why the big concern over this one?
Anyway, what is your opinion on this? Do you think that this is all for real or is it all just unreal? Something here just does not add up. Hey, I hope that I am wrong, but at this time, i am not sure that I am wrong about this created pandemic. So, what say you?
There may be some overreaction to this, I think it is likely warranted and most likely has to do with the nature of the virus and the numbers. If 50% of Canadians end up contracting this, and 20% of those Canadians who get it end up being hospitalized, that works out to about 3,800,000 people in Canada. If only 10% of those people need a critical care bed and a ventilator to keep them going, that would be about 380,000 people.
Ontario currently has 2,000 ICU beds and 1,300 ventilators, but most are in use. In Canada overall, there are about 5000 ventilators in total...again, many if not most of them in use. Some are predicting that if they can't slow down the progression of this thing, we're going to run out of capacity really, really quickly — likely in the next two weeks. It is also worth noting that ventilators seem to be in short supply everywhere in the world right now for some reason. And compounding this, most of the circuit boards for making more ventilators happen to come from...you guessed it...
China.
I don't think that the extreme government reaction you are currently seeing is coming so much from the virus itself as it is coming from the very real possibility that medical systems everywhere may simply collapse. If this happens, the death toll from the virus will be minor compared to the death toll from the lack of ability to treat people for all other life threatening inflictions they may be suffering from. The government is currently trying to spread out the rate of contraction of this virus to try and keep up with the demand and prevent a sudden deluge which, at this point will likely overwhelm the capacity of our medical system sometime in the near future.
The overreaction is warranted.