This situation is very confusing to me. As Certified points out, our health bureaucracy is issuing warnings and laying out scenarios that are pretty dire compared to recent pandemics. China, who presumably knows something about this, since that's where it originated, locked down an entire city of ten million (apologies if I get the population wrong) using pretty draconian methods.
But at the same time, South Korea, which has implemented aggressive testing seems to be handling it pretty well and infections and deaths are falling. China's new infections, and deaths I believe, are also falling (if you can believe their numbers). Italy, Spain, and Iran are having a tougher time of it.
Allowing that it's still early, this virus does not seem to be as severe as previous pandemics in my memory. In the US, he Swine Flu, for example, put 300,000 people in the hospital and killed over 12,000. That was about ten years ago. Nothing was shut down, there was no run on anything, and most people went about their lives as usual. So far, the number of cases and deaths worldwide are seem very low for all the fear. Every year, the common flues kill scores of thousands people in the US without fanfare. Here in the States, there have been so far less than four dozen fatalities from the coronavirus which were mostly about eighty years old.
So far, it seems like this is being over sold. Our press is mostly rabidly anti-Trump and some of their reporting feels like just more of the same. Having said that, you have to put a good deal of trust in those who study this sort of thing and they are, for the very most part, urging us to take this seriously so we should. We do not yet have enough data to estimate how many are likely infected and until we get better information, we're flying somewhat blind so playing it safe is a good plan.
As you might be able to tell from this post, I go both ways on this but I'm glad I'm retired so I can easily limit my exposure to this.
