The coronavirus is now killing TEN TIMES more Americans per day than the seasonal flu’s average daily death rate

Remember just two weeks ago when a long list of conservative publishers (and even some doctors) rolled out “bad math” articles that claimed the seasonal flu had a ten times higher fatality rate than coronavirus? They all now look strangely disconnected from reality as the real coronavirus death numbers continue to climb, debunking their bizarre theories rooted in mathematical illiteracy.

With the coronavirus pandemic now killing over 1,000 Americans per day, it has achieved a daily mortality total that’s ten times higher than daily regular flu deaths, on average.

Here’s a run down of the real numbers:

According to the CDC, the seasonal flu killed 34,157 people through the 2018 – 2019 flu season. Averaged over a calendar year, that’s nearly 94 people per day. Yes, it’s true that those deaths are clustered during the winter flu season (about half a year), but we’ll address that in a bit.

Today, coronavirus deaths in the United States have surpassed 1,000 in a single day… and they’re expected to rise to over 2,200 per day by mid-April, according to the Trump administration.

That means coronavirus is now killing ten times as many Americans per day than the seasonal flu does per day, on average.

The following graph, from Worldometers.info, shows the daily death totals as of yesterday. Today, it’s over the 1,000 mark:

DO THE MATH: The seasonal flu kills only around 35,000 per flu season, while the coronavirus may kill 240,000 in just the next few months, according to the White House

The reason so many pandemic denialists were able to say, until now, “the flu has killed more people” is because the coronavirus was just getting started when they made such shortsighted claims. Now that the coronavirus has spread sufficiently wide to infect perhaps a million or more people in the USA, the daily deaths are going to skyrocket, just as our pandemic projection models predicted nearly a month ago.

The White House is now projecting 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in America by the end of the summer. That’s seven times more deaths than the seasonal flu produces in an entire flu season. And these coronavirus deaths are being compressed primarily into April, May and June, just three calendar months. And that answers the seasonal flu “clustering” question, too, since the seasonal flu comes nowhere near killing 2,200 people per day even at its peak… yet that’s exactly what the White House expects will be happening in America in just two weeks, by April 15th.

And if the White House numbers are anywhere near correct, the coronavirus will kill many times more Americans than the seasonal flu, and this is only counting the first wave of the coronavirus that hasn’t even infected 5% of the population yet. What’s going to happen when the lockdowns end and the other 95% start to get exposed? Obviously, we’re going to have a second wave of coronavirus deaths in the Fall, and those numbers will continue to add to the totals that are observed from today through July.

Now even President Trump says it’s not the flu

In fact, President Trump himself has changed his tune quite dramatically over the last month. In early March, he was in a state of denial, pretending the coronavirus was no big deal and wouldn’t spread in America. (I warned him otherwise, but few listened…) Now, he’s done a complete reversal, saying, “It’s NOT the flu” and he’s now even advocating for stronger, more aggressive lockdown measures to halt the spread of the epidemic.

But the very simple bottom line is this: The coronavirus is now killing ten times more people per day in America than are killed each day by the regular flu, on average. And this blows away the false narratives that claimed the coronavirus would only kill 1 in 1,000 or even 1 in 10,000 as was claimed by some conservative publishers that tried to downplay the severity of the virus.

In fact, this entire pandemic has now convinced me that a whole lot of conservatives can’t do math. Not even fifth grade math. It’s incredible. They can’t see numbers until the dead bodies are overflowing to such an extent that the Pentagon has to order up 100,000 body bags and the hospitals are using fork lifts to load dead bodies into freezer trucks for bulk transport to morgues or crematoriums.

Rush Limbaugh still thinks the coronavirus is largely a hoax. It’s unreal. The man is delusional to the point of being a danger to society. His bad information and pandemic denialism is leading people to the kind of complacency that is right now getting people killed.

I no longer have any faith in any publisher that called this pandemic a hoax. They have lost all credibility. Some are still in a state of denial even as the daily deaths surpass 1,000 in the United States alone. For some of these publishers and writers, they won’t believe it’s real until someone close to them keels over and dies, and even then, they’ll probably find another excuse to try to explain away the death as something else.

Since 2016, I’ve watched liberals and progressives demonstrate unfathomable levels of delusional thinking when it came to the Russia collusion hoax and cultural issues like transgenderism and post-birth abortions. But after watching conservative publishers weave fantastic fairy tales to try to pretend this coronavirus was “just the flu,” I have to say many conservatives are just as delusional as the radical Left.

Which means no rational human being is safe anymore, as we’re all living in a highly polarized, tribal society run by lunatics who are completely disconnected from reality.

And that can’t be good for where all this is headed.

Stay informed and stay alive. Read Pandemic.news.