April 11 1970

On 2020-04-11 10:40 PM, JF Mezei wrote:
50 years ago today, Apollo 13 lifted off at 13:13

I know the world is currently going towards human extinction because of
a virus, but this is worth remembering.


That's a bit of a stretch. The morbidity of COVID-19 (which is the
autoimmune response triggered by the SARS-CoV2 virus which brings on the
pneumonia that kills) is looking to be approximately (as of current
sample) 156,901 out of a total of 2,284,108 confirmed cases worldwide[1].

That works out to be a morbidity of 7% (rounded) which means a survival
rate of 93%. Hardly an extinguishing event. In the US alone the figures
are 37,309 dead out of 711,107 confirmed cases or 5% (rounded, bankers
rounding). Using "confirmed cases" numbers is extremely conservative
since it only includes those that tested positive at the time of the
sample. There have been a total of 3,574,392 tested in the US, that puts
the morbidity among those tested in the United States at 1% rounded. The
population of the United States, according to Wikipedia[2] as of January
28, 2020 was 329,227,746 which puts the COVID-19 morbidity figure across
the entire population at .1% which is approximately 10x that of the
seasonal flu. Still pretty awful, but...

By matter of comparison, the believed morbidity of the smallpox virus
was 30%. Even that horrific disease was not species ending.

Dave

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demogr..._United_States