Corona math

During the last weeks we've been reading a lot about the dangers of Corona virus. Every day we read the news about how many have been infected and how many have died. Every day we are told about the thousands of people who have died around the globe. The message is always the same: "This is serious"!

When you're reading these news, you can see a pattern. None of the news articles gives you information about how much more deadly this corona virus is compared to normal. We never read about the flu death numbers we could compare the corona death numbers to. Why?

If you ask average Joe how many people die yearly on influenza, you can be pretty sure he doesn't have any idea. We don't want to think about these things in our daily lives, so no one has really any idea what is normal. How many of us even considers basic flu as a deadly disease killing huge amount of people every year?

Why don't we look at the numbers we could compare these Corona numbers to? Just to get some perspective.

Let's take an example from the US. During the flu season 2017-2018 there was a nasty influenza that according to CDC killed 61 000 people. Can you remember the screaming headlines: Deadly influenza hits the nation! Tens of thousands have died!

Me neither.

61 000 people died without anyone panicking. Why? Because it's normal that huge amount of people die because of influenza every year. No need to panic, no need to quarantine or to do anything that disrupts the daily lives of everyone.

At the moment 2489 people have died in the US. That is still far from 61 000.

There are 330 million people living in the US. The flu season of 2017-2018 killed 0,018 % of the population. If we assume the influenza was similar around the globe, we can calculate an estimate how many people died globally on influenza. 0,018 % of all the people of the globe would be 1 404 000 people.

In other words, if the influenza of the season 2017-2018 was globally the same as it was in the US, 1,4 million people died on influenza. This little calculation gives you some kind of comparable number of what's normal.

At the moment, the global death rate of Corona virus is 34 000 people. It's still quite far away from 1,4 million - which would still be considered as normal.

My question is: Is it a reasonable reaction to panic over this Corona virus? So far the death rate of Corona virus is a fraction of the death rate of yearly influenza.

So why are people panicking everywhere? Well, could it have something to do with the media? Would we have this kind of panic, if the media gave us comparable numbers and information about what is normal?