200,000 plus in America alone is pretty scary.

1.15 million worldwide.

What's the percentage there of 1.15 million deaths from 43 million cases?

About 2%?

Jenifer (Zarknorph) said:

"Europe became the second region after Latin America to surpass 250,000 deaths on Saturday, according to a Reuters tally, with record numbers of daily COVID-19 infections reported in the past two weeks."

Yes, we're into a second wave over here. Even the countries that appeared to do well during the first wave are having problems. Since we re-opened the schools and universities, the disease has surged. All quite predictable but all our countries agree that kids should go to school and students should study. 

The disease is mainly affecting younger people  but it will spread to the middle aged and elderly just as it did during the first wave.  In a few weeks time, our hospitals and their ICUs will be full up. We do have temporary emergency hospitals set up in the UK and in several other European countries and if we can't get this second wave under control, we'll probably need them. 

The only way to stand a good chance of avoiding the disease is to obey all the rules. Unfortunately the rules are being widely disobeyed by people who have no symptoms and don't think they're ill and by people who believe this pandemic is a gigantic Government plot to take away their rights.

About the same percentage of deaths during the last two major flu epidemics in the 1950s and 1960s which did not entail lockdowns, got very little media coverage, and no one even remembers.

I think it is important to factor in 2 things:

1. Covid is not the flu
2. Medicine has improved over the last 70 years.

A little bit of hope:

The itty bitty 5'1", 104 lb., 94 yr old mother of a friend was taken to the hospital last Wednesday with Covid.  She was given Remdisever (sp?), the same therapeutic Trump was given.  She came home from the hospital yesterday.  Maybe things are looking brighter.

(Source: Reddit) Flu ward at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918

Trump got "Regeneron" and a steroid cocktail.  Probably best that the itty bitty 104 year old didn't get his treatment.

Remdesivir (?) is much further along in the trials and shows promise.

I hope she's okay.

Common sense:

Bar talk - Theodore Dalrymple, Taki's Magazine, 30 October 2020
https://www.takimag.com/article/bar-talk/

... Speaking as the average man in the pub or bar, I have my own scheme. I cannot help but notice that the risk of death from COVID by age resembles very closely the risk of death by age from all causes: That is to say, at a low age the risk is negligible, rising slightly and then very rapidly after the age of 65—though there is no age at which the risk is zero.

In the age group to which I have the honor of belonging (though membership of it is not entirely voluntary), which is said to be at high risk of dying of COVID, though only a sixteenth as high as that of people over the age of 90, I noticed that in Britain, which had one of the highest levels of death from the disease, the chance of someone of my age dying of it during the height of the epidemic was 1 in 807. The normal risk, that is to say without COVID, would have been about 1 in 1,200. This is not the Black Death, then, though I suppose the death rate might have been much higher had it not been for the government measures taken.

Between a fifth and a sixth of the population is aged 65 or older, and it is this group that is overwhelmingly the most at risk of dying of COVID.

As a pub or bar epidemiologist, it seems to me that preventive efforts ought to be directed overwhelmingly at this age group, which is, alas, my own. My favored scheme would be for the rest of the population to go about its business as normal, with the over-65s remaining as much as possible indoors, taking precautions and not mixing with younger persons except with great circumspection. The degree of risk they were prepared to run would be up to them; there is no objectively “correct” level of risk to run.

For example, a friend of my age, in good general health like me, is much more cautious than I. He has scarcely left his house since the epidemic began. I, on the other hand, have been more outgoing, though still taking the precautions that I consider reasonable. As a consequence, he is less likely to contract the disease than I; but I consider the extra risk worth taking while he does not. Neither of us is “correct” in any indubitable sense.

I have noticed that older people, on the whole, already take precautions more seriously than the young who know that they have nothing to fear and in any case are risk-takers by nature. Of course, there are older people who cannot take care of themselves, either through physical or mental incapacity, but it surely should not beyond the wit of man, or even of governments, to devise a means of protecting them. Home deliveries of food by shops and supermarkets, for example, could be concentrated upon them.