We doomsday prepped today.
I was reading last night about the American Hospital Association’s predictions for Coronavirus over the next several months and it’s not good. At least for hospitals.
Here’s the thing…relatively healthy persons such as myself and Liz don’t have much to fear from this virus. It’s similar to the flu in that regard. It’s a serious health problem, but mostly for other people.
But, man…that’s enough. That’s enough for this to be a major problem. I spoke with my mother today. She’s a nurse at Stanford. And that’s where this is a major crisis: the hospitals. The flu is a problem every year, and this is expected to affect slightly more people than a very, very bad flu year.
Last year, 35 million people got the flu; a fairly normal season. They’re estimating 96 million people will get Coronavirus. That’s a really bad flu season, the worse we’d have had in 100 years IF it was the flu we were dealing with.
It’s not.
This is where the numbers get more fuzzy, but also scarier: of the 96 million people the AHA expects to contract Coronavirus, they expect 5 million people to need hospitalization to survive, and 2 million of those people to need ICU care.
We have 950,000 hospital beds in this country. 1/5th of what we’d need, if those projections are correct.
They expect almost 500,000 people to die from coronavirus.
To compare, 57,000 people died from the flu last year.
So, no. It’s—potentially—not the same as the flu, even 100-year bad season of the flu, because this virus appears to be almost 10x more deadly, and about the same factor of strain on our woefully inadequate hospital infrastructure.
So, yeah. That report definitely scared me. It gave me a better idea of the scope of what the medical community expects is coming. And because of that, we went out and got a couple weeks’ worth of non-perishables goods and meds to prepare if we have to take more drastic measures in this country and shut things down for a while.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. But there are some serious professionals and number-crunchers out there who think this is going to be very, very disruptive.
And while I don’t fear much for my own health, I do fear for the health of my mom who’s of an age now where she’s 100% at risk of serious complications should she get sick, and I fear for the economic health of our country and the world at large.
We’ll see what happens.
I sincerely hope it’s much ado about nothing.