Perspective for COVID panick

I have noticed that some people think COVID is not a big deal. Others are totally panicked. Fortunately most are between those two extremes. I am concerned about those who are beginning to feel hopeless and are living in constant fear of dying or losing a loved one. Although we should always be prepared for death, I wanted to share some stats to put things into perspective and hopefully calm some fears without encouraging carelessness.

I am not saying we should not be careful. Please do not spread the virus, but math has a way of putting things in perspective and shows us that we should take care without panicking. I just looked up the numbers and found stats from 2015 (so 5 years ago) and found out that about 156,000 people in the whole world died each DAY that year. I then looked up Worldometer and found that the current TOTAL death count for COVID-19 is about 175,000 (not each day but TOTAL over the whole world). That is a lot of people but is only slightly above the per DAY death count pre COVID-19. To listen to some of the panic we would think that people are dying at 100 times the rate of normal. So essentially after 4 months we have a 1.12 day increase in the number of deaths. Think of it this way, if the normal number of deaths doubled for 1.12 days that would account for all the COVID-19 deaths even if deaths from other causes were not reduced.

Math has a way of putting things into perspective. COVID-19 is a serious problem, but not something we need to live in constant fear of- especially with all the precautions that have been put into effect.