Thought of the Day - February 18 - Putting Things In Perspective

Thought I would change gears a little today, to put things into perspective. Deaths from COVID-19 are a real tragedy, but let's do some comparisons with other epidemics.

Spanish Flu: We liken this global pandemic to the Spanish Flu, however, it is estimated that between 3-5% of the world population (50 million) died from the Spanish Flu, to date COVID-19 has taken two orders of magnitude less (0.03%) of the current global population (2.4 million total so far). Note Canada's rate is close to double the world average so (0.06%).

Other Flus: Just before I was born the so-called Asian Flu killed 1.1 million, about the same % of the world's population as COVID in today's terms. A decade later the Hong Kong Flu killed about the same amount. And of course, as discussed earlier ( Thought of the Day - January 24 - By the Numbers ), in Canada, annual fatalities from influenza run about a third that of COVID-19.

HIV/AIDS: It is estimated that 25-35 million people have died of HIV/AIDS. While this has been over many decades it is still the biggest death toll from an infectious disease in our lifetime. And of course, HIV/AIDS is still prevalent. In Canada, about 75k people are living with HIV/AIDS and over 2,500 new cases diagnosed each year. Unfortunately, this number has been slowly increasing in recent years.

Measles: The year I was born measles killed about 3 million people or, population-adjusted, about twice as many as COVID. With the introduction of the world's most successful vaccine, which came into more common use in the late 60s, this number is now down to around 200,000 a year. But unfortunately, the number of measles cases is once again on the rise.

Comparing COVID Infectivity:

Drug Overdose: While this is a man-made phenomenon, not an infectious disease, here in BC more people died from drug overdoses in the last twelve months (1,716 in 2020) than COVID (~1,300). Moreover, this 2020 figure was a 74% increase from 2019.

All this to say, while our extraordinary efforts have prevented COVID from becoming far worse, in the grand scheme of things SARS-CoV-2 is not actually an extraordinary occurrence.

Cheers

Cliff