Over the past week I've been more than a little surprised by people's reaction to the COVID-19 virus. Across the country we've seen panic buying and hoarding. My wife was in our local grocery store the other day and a man - probably in his 70's and normally sane - nearly tackled her as he wrestled away the shopping cart she had been standing in line for for the past ten minutes. Every news outlet in the country seems to be telling us that the sky is falling and we should all stay home. A lot of our politicians have also gotten on that band wagon. They are spitting this stuff out without any context. It's no wonder that people are starting to panic.

I've been wondering where the voices of reason are. I haven't heard many so I decided to start looking up information on my own about the causes and number of deaths in the United States annually. After all, when everyone is telling you the world is ending, I think it might be wise to find out if that's actually the case. I've come to the conclusion that it isn't.

According to the CDC, 2,839,205 people died in the US in 2018; the last year for which data is currently available. Compare and contrast that with the worst-case scenarios for Coronavirus. The New York Times published an article earlier this month that quoted a CDC doctor as saying that he believes anywhere from 200,000 to 1.7 million Americans could succumb to the virus.

While those numbers are significant, it means that even if you go about your business as usual, your chances of dying from something other than COVID-19 are anywhere from 1.67 to 14.2 times greater. Yet only COVID-19 is sending people into a panic. Again, these are worst case scenarios.

So far, the global numbers for the disease look like this. 181,377 confirmed cases. 78,085 recovered. 7,119 deaths. Compare that to the 1.25 million people who lose their lives annually in automobile accidents around the world. Or the roughly 170,000 Americans who will die from some form of accidental death this year per the CDC.

Looking at a history of pandemics, the death toll from the COVID-19 outbreak is currently among the smallest. The 1918 Spanish Flu is estimated to have killed 50 million people including 675,000 Americans. More recently, the 1957 Asian Flu and the 1968 Hong Kong Flu both killed more than 1 million people worldwide.

Another way to look at the historical data is in deaths per 1,000 people. Since the population was smaller in days gone by, this gives us a good way of doing a comparison. In 1900, there were 17.2 deaths for every 1,000 people in the United States. By 2018, that had fallen to 8.6 per 1,000. Even in the very worst-case scenario of 1.7 million deaths from COVID-19, the number of deaths per thousand would be 13.8. That's just slightly higher than it was in 1920, when it stood at 13 and well below the 1900 number. To the best of my knowledge, nobody proposed shutting the country down then. Frankly, such a suggestion would have been unthinkable.

What is really startling to me is that I haven't heard one news outlet, politician or even a health-care professional talk about these statistics. That's remarkable. It also does everyone a disservice.

By no means am I suggesting that people shouldn't take precautions. Certainly, if you are immunocompromised, you should be staying away from other people.  We should all be washing our hands and practicing social distancing. If you are sick, stay home. Stop shaking hands when you greet someone and frequently clean surfaces that you think could become contaminated.

It's also a great idea for our healthcare system to take account of the things it will need to meet this challenge and prepare accordingly. And it should serve as a wake-up call to everyone that certain products, like ventilators, facemasks and pharmaceuticals should be produced domestically rather than outsourced. This is definitely a teachable moment.

But as people tell you that you need to shutter in place for the next two months with a five-year supply of toilet paper (and BTW, it is a respiratory disease) and 500 boxes of dried pasta, keep the historical data above in mind. We've never just shut down the country because we were facing some risks, even if those risks included the possibility of death.  Someone needs to be saying that we'll face this head-on and get through it. But that isn't happening, so I’m saying it here.

#LiveFearlessly