Rush Limbaugh accidentally explains how the coronavirus could kill over three million Americans, then says it’s “just the flu”

It’s time to start calling out the people who are distributing truly harmful, misleading information as they try to downplay the coronavirus pandemic for political purposes.

While we don’t want Americans to be fearful, we do want the American people to be informed. And that requires telling them the truth.

On his show late last week, radio legend Rush Limbaugh invited VP Mike Pence to join his show to help explain how America has the virus completely under control. As part of this explanation, Rush said that the coronavirus is “just the flu” and has a 98% survival rate.

For the record, Rush Limbaugh is a patriotic American and a brilliant political analyst. He has no formal education in the sciences, however, and remains “knowledge free” on topics like virology, epidemiology, infectious disease and genetics.

A 2% mortality rate would produce millions of deaths in America if just half the population is infected, but no one seems to be able to do the (simple) math

As he explained why the coronavirus is “just the flu,” Rush failed to mention the seasonal flu has about a 99.99% survival rate, according to the CDC’s published statistics, meaning the coronavirus is many times more fatal than the regular flu.

In fact, according to Rush’s own statements, if the coronavirus infects half the U.S. population — which is not unheard of when it comes to the spread of an especially virulent flu — we would expect about 165 million Americans to get infected.

As Rush Limbaugh explains, the coronavirus is believed to have a 2% mortality rate in first world countries where health care facilities are top notch. If you do the math, 2% of 165 million people is 3.3 million deaths in the United States alone.

Anyone claiming that 3.3 million deaths is no big deal is wildly misinformed or deliberately lying to the public.

The seasonal flu typically kills around 35,000 Americans each year, according to CDC estimates. This varies each season, and as you can see from these CDC statistics, in some years the seasonal flu kills only 23,000 people and in other years it kills over 60,000 people.

Last flu season saw a 45 million people infected, according to the CDC. If the coronavirus infects the same number of Americans and produces the 2% mortality rate cited by Rush Limbaugh, that would result in 900,000 deaths in America.

As the bodies begin to pile up, I suppose that sooner or later someone from the administration might notice something is wrong. At some point the explanation that “socialism is bad” becomes totally insulting to those of us in America who already realize socialism is bad and are concerned that a global pandemic is also very, very bad. Yes, we can beat Bernie Sanders, but can we beat the coronavirus? Not if we don’t even acknowledge its virulence and mortality trends.

Once the hospital beds are overrun, the death rate leaps to something more like 15%

There are fewer than 250,000 hospitals beds available in America, since most of the 980,000 hospital beds that exist in the country are already occupied.

Most of the 250,000 hospital beds which are available have no biocontainment capabilities, meaning they are essentially useless for treating patients with the coronavirus.

The number of biocontainment beds in the United States of America is an estimated 10,000 or fewer.

This means that if 0.003% of Americans get infected with the coronavirus, the biocontainment hospital beds will be full.

From that point, patients are simply told to go home and die.

Once patients are turned away from the hospitals, the death rate skyrockets to something more like 15%, as we’ve seen in China.

Rush Limbaugh has not yet explained to America how 165 million infected people will fit into just 10,000 hospital beds. Even if those infections are spread out over two years, it blows away the entire U.S. healthcare infrastructure almost immediately.

In truth, America is not even close to being ready for a pandemic, and empty words don’t stop this deadly disease from spreading

Not only is America not ready for this pandemic, America is headed for a public health nightmare if this spread continues in the USA as it has in nations like South Korea, Italy and Iran, where the spread is tracking an exponential growth curve that currently looks unstoppable until it burns through the entire population.

Instead of telling Americans to get ready with anti-viral foods, supplements, nutrients while storing up food and medical supplies for the coming medical quarantines, people like Limbaugh and Pence are actively dissuading Americans from knowing the truth about where this is headed.

That is a great disservice to America, and people like Rush Limbaugh have a responsibility to get educated and use their powerful platforms to inform the America people about what’s coming so that people can get prepared to help halt infections and survive the coming quarantines.

If anyone deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom in America, it’s the independent media truth-tellers who use logic, reason and reality to question the foolishness of the establishment while trying to warn the public to take active steps that may prevent infections and save lives.

But as I mentioned in an earlier article, the Trump administration’s response to this coronavirus is so far indistinguishable from China’s narrative that falsely claimed everything was under control.

Will America soon start hiding coronavirus deaths just like China? Will we see secret cremation ovens in U.S. cities that are labeled for “pet corpses?” Will Trump declare a national emergency and arrest independent media journalists who are unwilling to peddle official lies that downplay the reality of the exploding pandemic?

I don’t know the answers to those questions yet, but the early signs are very, very disturbing, and if influential conservative thought leaders like Rush Limbaugh can’t even understand the simple math behind the coronavirus, then we’re all living in Idiocracy’s hospital scene and there’s zero hope for any reasoned, informed, educated response to any of this.

Here’s a depiction of where we seem to be right now in America with the “official” response to the coronavirus pandemic: (explicit language)