The following is an excerpt from a March 13, 2020 article by Jonathan Tepperman, Editor in Chief,
Foreign Policy:
As of this writing,
116,145 people have contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and 4,090 of them have died. Worse, in the West, infections are still accelerating, which means it has yet to experience the pandemic’s full force.
...
We as a species have survived far worse. ... I’m talking about
HIV/AIDS (
which, for many years, had a 100 percent fatality rate, 95-99 percentage points higher than the coronavirus), SARS, and H1N1. I’m talking about
the seasonal flu, which killed 80,000 people in 2017-2018 in the United States alone—75,910 more than have died so far from COVID-19 worldwide. Or consider traffic accidents, which kill about
1.25 million people every year yet seem to have little impact on people’s behavior, either good and bad.
Yet, despite
the likelihood that the majority of people will never get the virus and that the vast majority who do (assuming it doesn’t mutate) will survive, people and governments are reacting in some extreme ways.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/11/coronavirus-global-panic/