More Math

Some people think we can do better than China, Italy, or other countries, because of various (mostly stupid, some not, but all fanciful) reasons, or they point to how well South Korea and Japan handled/are handling this outbreak. There's a reason for that performance.

Nota bene*:

SK has 22 {but probably closer to 12; see Comments. -A.}hospital beds per 1000 people. 

Japan has 13.4 per 1000. 

Italy has 3.2 per 1000. 

The US has 2.8 per 1000.

The UK has 2.8 per 1000.  

Canada has 2.7 per 1000.

We're not going to do as well as countries that have 4 to 7 times as many available hospital beds as we have.
To pull off a South Korea, we'd need 6.3M hospital beds, instead of 900K.
And BTW, we couldn't staff those beds (with doctors, nurses, etc.) in 30 years of WWII full mobilization effort. You'd need another 5M doctors and 10M nurses, which is also 500% more of either than we have right now.

So that's not going to happen.

We're going to be, more or less, like Italy.
So will the UK, and Canada.
We will not do this as well as Japan and South Korea.
We simply don't have that capacity.
We should be able to outperform Mexico.

The sooner people stop hanging on to magical thinking and thin reeds of fanciful wishes, the sooner they can start wrapping their heads around why we're doing what we're doing, and what may happen to us despite those efforts.

The short answer remains: Stay home, and don't catch this, so you don't give it to 4 other people.

And whenever this is all over, it might be an excellent time to have a chat with your nominal federal government representative about things like EMTALA requiring hospitals to care for everyone without regard to ability to pay (and then FedGov - which means you and me - not paying for it either, until we get our insurance premiums), and about letting 40M blood-sucking leeches come here illegally and camp out for 50 years and crank out kids like dandelions dropping seeds, all on the taxpayer's teat. Which has a lot to how we got where we are.
Just saying.

One other worst-case stat:
Probably more than 96% of everybody is going to live through Kung Flu, no matter what. Maybe even more than 99%.
Focus on that, if it's what it takes to grind through the crappy times. You should take this seriously. You should not be hysterical.





*{Don't believe me. As Casey Stengel said, "You could look it up." It's not like you're going to work or anything, right? You can look up most of those numbers per country here or here. On the WHO site, look "by country" and pull the slider bar down to the last couple of lines. Note that they don't precisely agree. Round it off. The SK number was courtesy of CNN. Wikipedia puts them at 12.3, not 22. Caveat emptor.}