#COVID19 will probably end up having approximately a 1% infection fatality rate. Which means millions of people dying in America alone.

But fatality isn’t the only bad outcome from this, and we have to stop pretending it is. Instead of the flu, compare covid to polio. (1/5)

Estimates vary based on the source, but 75-95% of polio cases were asymptomatic. Most didn’t even know they had it. Some infections gave a fever/flu like symptoms, and only one percent produced the paralytic symptoms we’re so familiar with. Deaths from polio were rare. (2/5)

But nobody (save the occasional anti-vaxxer) talks down the seriousness of polio, do they? No. Because we don’t think of polio in terms of the mild cases. We rightfully think of it as the iron lung disease. (3/5)

We need to stop thinking about the “lucky” cases of asymptomatic covid and focus on the people sick for months, the people getting limbs amputated, the people who need lung transplants, the people who are developing diabetes from the damage this is doing to their pancreas. (4/5)

It’s not the 30-40% of asymptomatic patients that we should focus on- we don’t for other diseases. Along with the fatalities, the millions of new chronically ill people from post-covid complications if this virus goes unchecked? That’s the real human cost of this virus. (5/5)