Some perspective (which I lack rather frequently) 1 million infections is 1/7800 of the world population, and 1/331 (.03%) of the US population (not including penguins, who don't matter).
US deaths so far is less than deaths from "regular flu" over the same time period. (rough guesstimate is 40,000 dead of "regular flu" since 1 Oct 2019 vs 5850 deaths from CCV)
I wonder what would happen if we responded to "regular flu" this way.
That's certainly one perspective.
Here's another from a doctor in NYC. Some key take-aways:
- On average, the hospital makes one crash-cart call (due to cardiac arrest) every week. This doctor heard 9 crash-cart calls in one 12-hour shift (and all 9 patients died).
- The hospital has beds for 283 patients but currently is treating in excess of 500.
- The hospital has been given double the number of ventilators that it originally had - but they are already being fully utilised and they need more.
- "The most anxiety I have is around ventilator allocation. Seeing people die is not the issue. We're trained to deal with death. Nor is it the volume of people dying. The issue is giving up on people we wouldn't normally give up on."
- A patient was brought in from an old people's home, already on a ventilator. All the doctor could see before her was the ventilator - not the patient. "When he came in we were so desperate for vents, all I wanted to do was get the ventilator off him. I wanted to get that vent off him to allow it to go to someone else."
- Doctors are playing God.
And all of the above are AFTER social distancing and a city-wide lockdown were put in place. You ask what it would be like if we treated COVID-19 just like the flu? I think we'd be in a world of hurt.
The total numbers you cite are not showing the whole picture, and your "same time period" is nonsense. Flu season in the US lasts from late-fall thru the spring, which is 4-5 months. The COVID-19 cases in the US have happened in THREE WEEKS! It's a tsunami...ontop of the normal cases our healthcare professionals have to deal with.
I don't know how many times people have to say this....COVID-19 IS NOT THE FLU. It's far more infectious, and it's overloading our healthcare services. That's the key problem here.