On March 20, 2020, Rejoice and I spontaneously went Live on Facebook to share our thoughts about the Coronavirus pandemic.

(Don't worry. The photo of us hugging was taken months before the Coronapocolypse.)

In 2014, when the Ebola contagion was raging across West Africa, I was traveling in West Africa. The world was panicking. Some worried that it would kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.

I thought most people were overreacting. Therefore, I wrote a prescient article called, "Don't Worry Too Much About Ebola."

I feel I could write the same article today about COVID-19.

Yes, Ebola and COVID-19 are different viruses.

COVID-19 spread far and fast; Ebola didn't.

Ebola's death rate was 53%. COVID's death rate is about 3.5%.

Still, the principle is the same.

Humans excel at detecting patterns.

However, we have a tendency of over projecting trend lines.

When we see a graph skyrocketing (or plummeting), we often believe (incorrectly) that the trend will continue for a long time.

It often doesn't.

Listen to my podcast with Rejoice. Sorry that her voice is sometimes hard to hear. She speaks softly.

Lastly, don't misunderstand me.

I'm not suggesting that we should ignore COVID-19 or that it's not serious. We should continue taking the extreme measures we're taking such as sheltering-in-place.

I'm simply saying that we shouldn't panic or believe that this contagion will kill tens of millions.

A few months ago, I gave my third TEDx talk, which was about the 7 surprising lessons I learned from picking up 3,000 African hitchhikers.

At the 14th minute, I shared a statistic that is relevant today during the #Coronapocolypse. I queued up the video link below to that moment in the talk.

https://youtu.be/5WxfRLByD60?t=833

Spoiler alert: Every year, 470,000 humans die worldwide from influenza.

Today, 14,000 have died worldwide from COVID-19.

That sucks, but even if 100 times more people die from COVID-19 than the flu (which would 1.4 million, that would mean that COVID-19 is only 3 times more deadly than our annual flu.

That would suck, but let's keep those statistics in mind before we all jump off a moderately tall building.

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