It's Sunday morning so now's as good a time as any for some COVID math. Follow along. 1/x

NYC has 8.4 million people (source: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/newyorkcitynewyork). If 21% have had COVID (as the governor said this week), that's 1.76 million people. 2/x

As of yesterday:
Confirmed deaths:10,961 (0.6%, or six-tenths of one percent of the 1.76 million people)
Probable deaths:5,309 (0.3%)
Source: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
3/x

So, so far, in six weeks, 0.9 percent of those 1.76 million infected people have died of COVID (confirmed or probable). That’s, of course, assuming that none of the others who died are COVID related. (To date about four times as many people as typical have died in NYC.) 4/x

But even if you assume all 8.9 million people in NYC were infected, the COVID mortality rate would be 0.19 SO FAR (including probables and confirmed). 5/x

By comparison, the flu mortality rate in 2018-2019 was 0.1 percent of those infected for the whole flu season. source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html.

The 2017-2018 flu season was bad and its mortality rate was 0.14 percent after six months. 6/x

So after six weeks, this has well exceeded flu mortality in NYC even if you assume 1) the entire population is infected with COVID-19 and 2) there will be no more deaths.

Respectfully, this is not the flu. -end