[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.