[Consultant32452]

Governments have other concerns besides your individual health. They need to prevent panic as much as possible, prevent economic collapse, etc. The response to events like this can be worse than the initial problem.

What do you think happens if the CDC says everyone needs to wear masks, you go to your local store, and there are no masks? There would be violence in the streets.

[allovernow]

>They need to prevent panic as much as possible, prevent economic collapse, etc. The response to events like this can be worse than the initial problem.

If this event is half as bad as all the literature out of China is suggesting, panic is the least of our worries. What a responsible government should do is initiate some sort of recommendation for gradual stockpiling of goods - perhaps a lottery just to encourage the majority of people to calmly stock up in turns.

In any case the CDC has already issued warning to prepare for "severe disruption to everyday life." Now it's up to the ignorant population to wake up and realize that this isn't just another flu.

[Barrin92]

>If this event is half as bad as all the literature out of China is suggesting, panic is the least of our worries

No. The risk of dying from this disease is negligible for most American adults. The real issue with the corona virus is economic disruption and overburdening of the healthcare system. All of which is significantly exarbarated by panic.

[allovernow]

>The real issue with the corona virus is economic disruption and overburdening of the healthcare system. All of which is significantly exarbarated by panic

Which is literally the point of my post. The population ideally will have started gradual, orderly preparation sooner. At this point it's better to have a short panic early rather than end up in a situation where the government kept quiet but suddenly the virus is here and people are running out of food and there's a mass panic.

The longer the government waits, the worse the outcome will be.

[takeda]

Say what you want, but 2% is not negligible. That's 1 of every 50 people. With 330,000,000 population that's over 6.5mil people.

Yes, the mortality changes with age younger people are about 0.2% but older are close to 15%.

Having health issues such as cardiovascular or diabetes increases the risk further, and Americans aren't the healthiest people.

[wool_gather]

You are mixing up several different measurements.

First, parent was talking about the risk to an individual adult person; you yourself note that varies with other parameters including age. This isn't comparable to the 2% figure.

Second, the mortality figure is 2% of people who are infected, not of the total population. So it's substantially less than 6.5 million people, unless literally everyone in the country catches the bug.

[Consultant32452]

Mortality rate in China is 3.8% nation wide, 5.8% in Wuhan.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

[vanusa]

No. The risk of dying from this disease is negligible for most American adults.

Can you tell us please:

(1) What your numeric definition of "negligible" is

(2) And on what math this is estimate based?

[Barrin92]

current risk for healthy adults appears to be 0.1-0.2% which is comparable to a bad flu season while the chance of getting infected is lower by several magnitudes given how relatively few numbers of cases there are even if you assume there's a lot of asymptomatic cases.

If we take China as a comparison, a country with urban agglomerations of 50 million people and more and the 80k cases as rough estimate then the chance that you're even going to be infected in the US is marginal.

So unless you panic literally every time you leave your house I don't see why this is appropriate to cause a panic.

[vanusa]

Current risk for healthy adults appears to be 0.1-0.2% which is comparable to a bad flu season while the chance of getting infected is lower by several magnitudes given how relatively few numbers of cases there are even if you assume there's a lot of asymptomatic cases.

Not sure what to do here. This isn't even a coherent sentence. Nevermind the handwavey logic.

[lubujackson]

So you are arguing that the CURRENT risk is way less, with no consideration given to the exponential spread of the disease as we have seen in China and now South Korea, Italy and Iran? The only thing keeping the exponential spread in check is everyone literally bunkering in place for weeks, but there is no logical reason the spread won't pick up again as soon as people are forced to go out and interact again.

The virus seems to persist for quite a while so you can't simply wait a couple of weeks (or even months) for this to blow over - best case is the seasonal change will slow it considerably, but that isn't a guarantee either. Historically, viruses with these characteristics weaken over time because they don't benefit from killing their host.

So hopefully 2 years from now this will be another annoying virus that comes and goes, that is the best case natural outcome. Maybe we have some breakthrough in vaccines or luck with off-label cures like the malaria drug in trial now, but those are longshots. So it is LIKELY that this is going to be a long and unhappy situation globally.

[vanusa]

That's the thing - the commenter doesn't even bother to distinguish between current and future risk. Let alone the risk to someone living in a major, congested, filthy city v. in a shack on a mountaintop somewhere.

So there's not much we do with their prognosis.

[Consultant32452]

There simply is not enough supplies for everyone to slowly stockpile goods. Supply chains are already being disrupted. In China beekeepers are not able to get their bees to crops. The bees are starving. This will negatively impact global honey and crop yields for years. In Italy panic buys are already leaving shelves empty. If the government tells everyone to slowly stock up what will really happen is panic buys and wide spread violence.

[allovernow]

The alternative is a mass panic when the virus arrives.

[Consultant32452]

Exactly. If you have to choose between guaranteed mass panic today and probable mass panic tomorrow, always choose tomorrow. This is what the professionals at places like the CDC understand.

[im3w1l]

> Governments have other concerns besides your individual health.

Exactly. And that's why I'm gonna look out for myself.

[SteveNuts]

Then why don't they have millions of masks stockpiled for an event like this?

[owenmarshall]

They do. But they aren’t stockpiled for you: they are stockpiled for medical professionals.

And the 30 million the US has stockpiled is short by a factor of ten: https://time.com/5785223/medical-masks-coronavirus-covid-19/

[allovernow]

In any case we need more than masks for this. Medical equipment like mechanical ventilators, intubators, and external oxygenation machines. Those will run out very quickly.