COVID-19 in Texas: An update with context.

Time for a Wuhan virus numbers update in Texas. For those of you deriving some perverse pleasure from the fear of the outbreak, save you anger over inconvenient facts for your hiding-under-the-bed friends.

Governor Abbott says the state’s infection rate dipped to 5.6 percent on Friday and, using Texas’ official figures on the morning of Monday, May 11^th, there were only 1,734 being treated in hospitals.

The 1088 fatalities chalked-up to COVID-19 in Texas, while sad in the specific, is only about ten percent of the number of those recorded as dying from the flu in the state in a regular, non-peak, influenza season. Over 10,000 were recorded as having died from flu and related complications in the last full influenza season (2018-2019) and that was over a full fall-to-fall season. In fact by July of last year 9,249 flu-related deaths had been recorded in the Lone Star State.

The point is not to minimize the loss of those from whom COVID-19 caused their respiratory failure nor is the point to downplay deaths from influenza. The point is one of context that seems lost on those who, out of ignorance or irrational fear, believe this latest coronavirus is some unique killer and worthy of justifying actions which destroy our society and civil liberties.

Over the entire first quarter of 2020 as well as almost half of the second quarter of the year, COVID-19 appears to have lead to the death of only about ten percent the number of people killed annually by influenza.

All of the extraordinary actions imposed by governments were specifically justified by the desire to slow the infection rate so as to not overtax our hospitals. Our Texas hospitals never approached such a problem, the fatality rate is only about ten percent of expected annual flu deaths, and yet once free people are still facing restrictions and facing unemployment and economic contraction last seen in the global Great Depression.