Limbaugh: Remember The Swine Flu Panic? 60 Million Americans Infected, 300,000 Hospitalized | Video | RealClearPolitics
Folks, panic is& I don t know. I m not panicked. I am ticked off like you cannot believe, and I am really having a conversation with myself about how far to go in explaining why I m mad, cause I m mad about the politics of this. For example, let me give you some statistics. How many of you even remember the swine flu 2009, 2010? I don t remember it. I mean, I remember we had it. But I don t remember any panic about it. I don t remember a thing about the swine flu.
I went back and looked at the stats and I was stunned. Are you ready for this? The swine flu outbreak in this country in 2009 and 2010, 60 million Americans were infected. Do you remember that? Sixty million were infected. Dr. Siegel, one of the Fox doctors was on TV explaining this last night. He was not my primary source for it, but he ended up confirming it. Sixty million people were infected.
Do you know how many people were hospitalized in 2009-2010 with the swine flu? Three hundred thousand were hospitalized. So 60 million people infected, 300,000 hospitalized. And nobody even remembers it. And why? Well, because we had a different president. We had a Democrat president by the name of Barack Obama, and the news then was how wonderfully well Obama was handling it, how expertly well Obama was dealing with it.
It’s true that there has been some irresponsible media coverage, but Rush is being irresponsible as well in minimizing this. People listen to him and as a result are making bad decisions.
Suppose 60 million Americans get this novel Coronavirus, as many as got the swine flu. Then take one percent of that total, the number that will die of this disease, perhaps optimistically. That gives you 600,000 people. About 400,000 Americans died in WW2, approximately, which is generally credited with being a sanguinary event. And that’s with a CFR of 1 percent. Italy, with its overwhelmed medical system, now has a CFR of 6 percent. I hope it goes down; perhaps it will. But in a worst case, with an equally overwhelmed medical system, that would give us 6 times 600,000, or 3.6 million dead, more than 3 times the number of Americans killed in all of the wars the US has fought in since 1776.
One hopes the CFR will be a lot closer to 1 percent, or even much less than that, but that’s not what the numbers currently suggest. In Hubei China, the CCP is reporting a CFR of about 4.5 percent, and those numbers are probably cooked a lot to look better than they really are. There will probably also be more than 60 million Americans who get the virus. Best guesses by experts are closer to half of Americans — say 160 million. If one percent of them die, that’s 1.6 million– that’s a catastrophic number. Half that is still a lot more Americans than WW2.
There is a lot of stupid happy talk coming from the Right. Some people are listening to it. But don’t. If we’re wrong, there will be plenty of time to eat crow later. There are worse things to choke on than crow, like the sh*t that will fill up your lungs if you die of COVID-19.