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Originally Posted by Undertoad
If the regular flu kills up to 70,000, what say let's put the over-under for this level of panic at 80,000 dead. The panic has resulted in the loss of 6 trillion dollars in valuations of public companies, and the loss of who knows how much economic activity. So a number worse than the regular flu is warranted. 80,000, place your bets.
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I like the numbers game, with two caveats. One, everything I've read says flu kills around 36,000 per year in the U.S., and I think we have to go with exclusively U.S. numbers if we're talking about U.S. panic. Two, the death toll from COVID-19 may take a year or more to fully assess, because this thing is going to continue to kill people, fast or slow, until we've achieved some level of herd immunity...
That being said, I personally think over 100,000 deaths means it was a problem worth focusing on as much as we have--roughly three times the rate of the normal flu. My actual prediction is that it's going to kill over a million Americans.
Edit to add: I say this as someone who lost an uncle to the bad flu season two years ago. I don't know if it was technically his cause of death in the final paperwork, but his downturn started with a bout of flu caught at his nursing home, escalating to pneumonia, compounded by Parkinson's.