Coronavirus: are we hyperreacting?

I am writing this because several people have prodded me to. This is my take.

I have no idea why a very influential and supposedly responsible organization like the WHO has started bandying around words like epidemic and pandemic, despite the Director-General himself saying they should not be used carelessly. Well, let's look at a few very recent figures.

Since the scare began at the start of the year, a little more than 5,000 people have died, 3,200 of them in just one country, China. Out of 80,000+ who were infected there, nearly 67,000 have recovered already.

In the US, a little more than 3,000 infected people have been identified, and 60 have died (that's two per cent, by the way, and a little more digging will probably reveal most of them were old and weak and even ill already).

In India, positively identified infections has just risen beyond 100, and the number of deaths so far is 2 (oh, no, some will tell me: you are way off the mark; the actual number is 3).

Put this a little in perspective. Without a pandemic/epidemic of any sort, the number of normal deaths per day is 150,000 (two-thirds of age-related causes); 26,000 in India alone. That's almost 55 million a year (by the way, 150,000 people died in road accidents in India alone in 2018, and no sign of any alarms anywhere!).

As for epidemics and pandemics. When I was a child I was told of cholera and malaria epidemics which killed off whole villages in a matter of days, hundreds of thousands before the storm abated. The greatest pandemic we know of, the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918-19, also called the Spanish Flu, killed off 20 to 50 million worldwide; some experts claim nearly 100 million, or nearly 3% of the world population at that time!

By reacting as we are, putting whole nations in lockdown mode, we shall probably be doing economic harm to ourselves on a scale from which it will take many decades to recover. Talk of mass hysteria...

Also, everybody seems to have forgotten about similar scares which arose and subsided quickly without doing significant harm in the fairly recent past:mad cow disease, chicken flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zyka, H1N1, SARS and on and on. Even  AIDS didn't create a tiny fraction of this kind of consternation worldwide!

So my take is very well expressed by this letter-to-the-newspaper writer. It is good that we are taking precautions, so that the death toll may be limited to a few thousands, but I am not sure we are doing it the best way.

And yes, as I write this, I am perfectly well aware that the new virus could kill me, but equally that, statistically speaking, there are at least ten much more likely ways that I might die. And no, I am not going to drink cow's urine as a potent preventive, even to save my life.

If some of my readers think this is the voice of informed and sound common sense, please share it with as many people as you can, in the larger public interest. 

P.S., March 18: Here is an article by an infectious-disease trained epidemiologist which can help to calm your nerves, if you can read, understand, think and remember.