The tweet that didn't age well.
Commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic by various observers have repeatedly been proven wrong, and yet, they continue to move the goalposts as if the core arguments remain true. How wrong could they be?
Well Mr. Bill Mitchell here tweeted this out beginning of April, and to much fanfare, with over 5000 retweets and over 10,000 likes. Popularity aside. It's still ignorant and frankly wrong.
The 2009 Swine Flu may have had 1.4 billion cases world wide, and a death toll of 575,400 people, but in the US, there were only 60 million Swine flu cases, 274,3044 hospitalisations, and a grand total of 12,469 deaths.
How ignorant can you be?
When Bill Mitchell posted this tweet, there were just over 1 million cases world wide. Now there are over 1.4 million cases in the U.S alone.
- The Swine flu killed 12,469 Americans in the time span of an entire year, where as COVID-19 has killed over 85,000 Americans in just two months. Just for reference, the death toll on March 21st was just 321 deaths.
- In terms of the mortality rate, Swine flu killed 0.0002% of the Americans who got infected, while COVID-19 has killed 0.0595%. COVID-19 is about 300 times more fatal. The mortality rate is also set to rise because the total number of active cases is still over a million with around 20,000 cases added daily.
- In terms of global deaths, the Swine flu killed 576,000 people in the span of a year, but COVID-19 has already killed over 300,000 in the first four months, and this is assuming China has reported their deaths accurately (totally unreliable)
Most of the deaths from Swine flu were in people who were relatively young, in-fact 80% of the deaths were from people under the age of 65. Just over a third of people over the age of 60 had antibodies against it, likely stemming from being infected with older strains of Swine flu at some point in there lives.
Right now, we have no idea who has antibodies to COVID-19.