I’m going to ask you to make a commitment but first…
A Little Background
I know I have to keep this short. So I won’t go into detail about how my wife is a nurse and therefore we might have a lttle more skin in the game. Or dwell on the importance of drawing conclusions that are based on good information. Not as a result of viral e-mails, or wishful thinking or… but based on data and evidence: science.
I am still hearing from and seeing individuals and groups that are questioning the significance of what is happening around us and questioning our need to self isolate. Graphics like this one in particular have been used to downplay the severity of our situation.
This is a (less than helpful) comparison of a brand new disease in its early stages with diseases that are geographically isolated or treatable and preventable for the most part. In fact, the number of global deaths per day for Covid has already gone from 56 to 225 (from March 12 – 23). I contacted the author of this graphic to express my concerns and if you go to the website, you can see that they have added a number of annotations and caveats to the graphic
Here are two, more helpful and eye-opening graphics, that compare “apples with apples” in real time as of day 73 (today for Covid which is in red) of three comparable diseases and can be found at https://covid19info.live/ under “Show More Graphs.”
A comparison of global cases:
And a comparison of global deaths.
It is not just about you or me contracting the virus or “older” people dying, it is also about not spreading the virus (which any of us can do) and overwhelming our health care capacity to the extent that minor and routine medical interventions will go untreated and turn into major ones. Not to mention many, many more people dying (including “young” people).