Originally Posted by spasm3
Originally Posted by madRiver
Death rate is 0.1% for flu and approaching 3% for Coronavirus. Both highly contagious just flu obviously got way more people get it currently.
Concern is death rate.
Its hard to take that death rate and relate it to the US. There is a difference in healthcare and demographics. 1 death in the US, and we really don't know the real numbers of who is infected here. I would not compare the death rate of a dense populated lower healthcare country like china to here.
The overall smoking rate is probably 8% higher there( 17% USA vs 24% China) than the US ( 19% male smoking rate USA vs 47% male smokers in China) so more lung disease, heart disease, and hypertension. That would not go well with coronavirus, especially in the elderly.
We will have to wait and see what happens here. But i'm going to doubt a 2-3% rate here.
First of all, we have no clue what is COVID-19 infection rate in the US as testing kits are not available, which tells a lot about HC system in the US or failure of communication right now. In Italy things are pretty dramatic, and their HC system is ranked second, the US 37th by WHO. So, that argument is ridiculous at best. We might have actually more deaths from COVID-19, but if we do not test, then how we know? They just said that 15,00 test kits are going to be available, and we have 6,500 hospitals in this country. So, what is happening now in the markets is insecurity about what is exactly going on bcs. China is trying to control flow of information, and in the US there is clearly failure to get ahead of this.
IMO we will see slow down because of one of these two things:
1. Pandemic
OR
2. Lack of confidence in government response.
Either way, we are up for some chopy times. Things in Europe and Japan looked bad economically even before COVID-19.