The reason Covid-19 won't kill 900 people a day for a year is specifically because of the measures being taken to prevent it.
The numbers were offered to illustrate the fact that the virus is considerably more lethal than the common flu. I don't see any basis for arguing that the death rate doesn't demonstrate that horribly effectively.
I would also point out that since the 900-deaths-a-day figure was posted (which is almost guaranteed to be a severe underestimate), that figure has been exceeded every single day.
The question that was being discussed was how much more dangerous than the flu Covid-19 is. The post did a pretty effective job of demonstrating that it's vastly more dangerous.
1. The post was not designed to do that, it was designed to take advantage of the naivette most people have when it comes to understanding #s. There's lies...damned lies...and statistics.
2. Is it really fair to compare a virus we have a vaccine for that still kills ~30-50k people in the US every year to a virus that we've never seen before and no one has natural anti-bodies to? Did you not expect it to be more deadly? Anyone attempting to make a straight comparison whether to downplay the deadliness of Sars-Cov2 or to do the exact opposite isn't being fully honest.
3. I'd argue it is overly effective at making your point because the flu is seasonal (i.e. 4 months of the year) and we don't know what this is yet. So to be completely fair you'd need to divide # of flu deaths by the # of days it's actively killing people, not over 365 days. All projections have this as killing 80-100k people in the US. If we divide that by 365 that's far fewer than 900/day 1100/day, etc.
My response is not meant to downplay the seriousness of Sars-Cov2 at all, but I'm not a big fan of misusing data to "scare" people into submission and if anything I think this downplays how lethal the flu actually is and the importance of getting the yearly vaccine.
When this is all over we'll be able to establish how "deadly" this virus really is, until then anyone's guess is just an opinion on incomplete data.
Even the model being used as the basis for CNN and the Whitehouse is already off by an order of magnitude.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-americaThe average death count on the 3 days since the updated model has come out has been over-estimating deaths by ~40%.
I'm glad the social distancing and shelter-in-place measures seem to be working, but remember at the end of the day we can't stay in our homes until we develop a vaccine, so if it's true this doesn't fade away in the summer like other viruses then there's a strong chance most of us will come into contact with it, unless of course, you're planning to shelter-in-place until ~2022.