Please can you give me some examples of "any respiratory disease" which:
1. Overloads hospitals and critical care
2. Has managed to kill 6000 health care workers globally
3 May lead to Cytokine storm
Well, the one that immediately springs to mind would be influenza. I'm sure that there are others, but influenza would be top of the list.
1. Overloads hospitals and critical care:
Some random links:
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-01-french-hospitals-overwhelmed-flu-epidemic.htmlhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5279685/California-hospitals-looks-like-flu-war-zone.html
2017 seems to have been a tricky winter in the USA, 2015 was bad for the UK. Italy seems to get overwhelmed every year, and other countries have their own issues. Influenza does seem to get the better of the health care planners. Being overwhelmed says more about the lack of competence of the planning system than it does about how virulent or otherwise a disease is.
2. Managed to kill 6000 health workers worldwide (and 600 from the UK, you added in a later post.) The NHS has 1.1 million members of full-time-equivalent staff, apparently, which probably means more actual bodies, as some work part time. If your 6,000 dead were purely from the NHS that would be an IFR of 0.5%, which is higher than influenza, but not dramatically so. Just the 600 who actually were in the UK gives us an easy to calculate 0.05% fatality rate. If you include all health workers worldwide (a very quick search gave me 40 million health workers worldwide in 2013 - no idea if it is accurate) you get an IFR of 0.015% - quite a mild influenza indeed. Health workers are people too: they are perfectly entitled to catch and die from diseases that "ordinary" people also catch and die from. Unless my numbers are significantly wrong (always a possibility) then the coronavirus looks to be no more agressive than your average influenza when it comes to health workers- which we already know because the vast majority of "victims" are people over 70. It might even be said that health workers are actually getting off lightly this year, as normal influenza is more fatal at lower age ranges. It would seem that this is an emotive argument without much relevance to the disease and it's actual fatality rate.
3. May lead to Cytokine storm. Wikipedia tells us:
Cytokine storm - Wikipedia
"Cytokine storms can be caused by a number of infectious and non-infectious etiologies, especially viral respiratory infections such as
H5N1 influenza,
SARS-CoV-1,
[2][3] and
SARS-CoV-2 (
COVID-19 agent). Other causative agents include the
Epstein-Barr virus,
cytomegalovirus, and
group A streptococcus, and non-infectious conditions such as
graft-versus-host disease.
[4]"
It's that sneaky influenza in the list again. The more I look into this, the more evident it becomes that, by any metric you care to use, our novel coronavirus is not worth the damage being done in order to fight it. And more to the point, it really isn't any more deadly than a bad influenza outbreak.