Terrified that coronavirus is getting worse than better

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The more I hear about it the more anxious it makes me feel about it, I hear about cases of people having it rising and still the news of 40 or 45,000 people recovered from it still doesn't quite reassure me, it freaks me out when they talk about lockdowns and stuff.

It's freaking me out too. They said themselves on the news that most people who get it will just have mild flu symptoms and will most likely recover - yet they're still making all this fuss; threatening to shut schools, airports, stores, and talking about these lockdowns. It makes it sound like it's 100% certain to kill everybody. Some people are even receiving text messages strictly warning them not to go out if they have any possible symptoms of coronavirus.
The world can't just pack up and stop because of this virus that has just as much potential to kill the elderly and physically vulnerable as any other virus. When I worked in a care home, the norovirus and the flu went around (not at the same time) and killed lots of the elderly patients, and it probably killed more worldwide than this coronavirus ever will.

The more the government goes over the top with this, the more people will panic, become paranoid and everything will just shut down - and all the while the virus will still spread no matter how much everybody isolates themselves (if it comes to that).

Was it this bad with the Swine Flu epidemic?

You may have caught the virus already, and you my not even know it!

Exactly.

The more government officials lie in order to quell panic, the worse then panic becomes because this is 2020. Anyone can easily look up information from experts that contradicts the dishonest reassuring narrative that government's push, realize they are being lied to, trust evaporates, then they proceed to ignore everything else the government officials say, rightfully so. This is the point at which panic and conspiracy theories thrive.

I don't see why everyone's so worked up about it, to the best of my knowledge it's no more dangerous than any regular flu virus. Am I missing something about it (entirely possible, I tend to be rather out of the loop)?

Like the regular flu, it severely affects those who are already in poor health or are very fragile health wise. Most of the same people who have died from corvid19 would probably have died from any severe influenza virus. Influenza has been a pandemic virus for a long time. Back in 2004 or whenever there was the same panic over the SARS coronavirus. Just like there was a huge panic over Ebola back in 2013 or whenever. I am sure there was a huge panic over AIDS back in the 80s.

Thank you EzraS for bringing up the Ebola panic in 2013. I keep telling people that the caronavirus is nowhere near as deadly as Ebola was and that, if I remember correctly, was spread over more countries than the caronavirus.

My coworker has been getting over the flu but hasn't gone to the doctor yet. She finally went yesterday, and she said the doctors immediately began treating her like a lepore because of the scare that's going on. Granted, she is Asian so it probably didn't look good. They wouldn't even test her for the flu because they said if she possibly has the caronavirus, taking her sample for flu and bringing it to the testing machines could spread the disease throughout the whole doctors' office.

Everybody needs to calm down.

It's substantially more deadly than the flu. Something like ~1-2% with COVID-19, vs. ~0.1% for the flu (so ~20x more deadly.)

https://www.livescience.com/new-coronav ... h-flu.html

From what I've understood, the thing that makes it more dangerous than a regular disease is that it attacks the lungs more directly. I also read that out of those who get infected, 80 % get mild symptoms (might end up bedridden, but mild anyway) and the remaining 20 % get in to a bad shape. The later are usually those with compromised health, in other words either elderly OR those with chronic health problems, especially if it's a lung problem. Healthy young people can die from it as well, but the chances are a lot lower.

I'd say that everyone who doesn't belong to the risky groups should just take better care of their hygiene than they usually do for now and wait for further instructions. Those who do (including myself) should limit their exposure to other people for the sake of their own safety... though that's hard if one works in customer service and/or has to use public transport. Now would be a good time to be temporarily unemployed...

But how come the world wasn't freaking out as bad as what they are with this coronavirus? I remember the Ebola crisis in 2014 but I don't remember there being all these over the top precautions about it like there is with this.

Historically Ebola has been so deadly that outbreaks 'burn out' quickly, people don't spend a week spreading Ebola without showing symptoms, they quickly show symptoms and get very sick and usually die. It's easy to control the spread of something like that, compared to something where lots of people who get it don't show much in the way of symptoms.

Well then why all this fuss and lockdowns and stuff?

I think it’s like with the SARS and MERS panics: they’re all terrified that it might be a repeat of the Spanish Flu of 1918-19.
Which if I remember rightly was the second deadliest pandemic after the Black Death.

Did do a bit of reading up last night: Covid-19 doesn’t seem to be spreading as fast as Spanish Flu did, or to have anything like the mortality rate.

^ Speaking of the Spanish Flu, my sis said that there's been a deadly epidemic around every hundred years... in the 1900s it was Spanish Flu, in 2000s... nothing so far, apparently. But it can also be that the swine flu or something would have been it if it wasn't for the modern medicine and knowledge.

^ Yes, I’ve been thinking of smallpox and scarlet fever, the bubonic plague and the sweating sickness as well.
Pretty sure what Roman history we have describes a series of major plagues every so often too, but as with the medieval period what descriptions we have from Europe aren’t all that helpful in identifying what type of disease they were referring to.

And yes, we have much better medical knowledge: and much more effective bureaucracies to manage the implementation of that knowledge than even a hundred years ago, let alone five hundred or a thousand years back.