Do the math; with Trump's aggressive efforts coronavirus won't be much worse than the flu

Over at PowerLineBlog they posted this plot showing deaths per million for various countries:

Italy has by far the highest rate at around 67 per million.  It could rise higher to say 100 per million.

Presently the US rate is 0.7 per million.

The US rate is unlikely to rise to that of Italy because:

• The Italian population is much older than the US population
• The Italian medical system funnels people into hospitals where they can spread the disease
• More Italians smoke
• The US is already deploying advanced anti-virals and other drugs that seem to be working
• Thanks to Trump the US cut off travel to China early; something Italy didn't do
• Italy has many more Chinese nationals than the US does due to Italy's economic agreements with China

But let's assume that the US rate does hit 100 per million.  Given a population of 330M that means that 330*100 = 33,000 Americans will die.

That seems to be a huge number but yearly flu deaths range from 12000 to 61000, or more.

What makes the flu worse from a societal perspective is that it kills young productive people and children whereas corona virus mostly kills the elderly.  While the lives of the elderly are just as valuable the reality is that old people dying won't keep the country from producing food--or toilet paper--and won't lead to the collapse of society.

Hence while we all should be responsible in order to protect those who are most vulnerable keep in mind that there's no reason to panic--even if you're elderly because odds are even if you catch the disease you won't die from it.

When the Spanish Flu wreaked havoc in 1918 killing 670,000 Americans, generally younger people, and yet society didn't miss a beat; WWI continued unabated.

The US population in 1918 was 103,000,000 so that means that the death rate was 0.65% or 6,504 per  million.  That's  65 times the worse than what we expect in Italy.

So don't hoard, don't panic, act responsibly to protect those at risk, and pray. But don't panic.