[dont__panic]

Without mitigation, sure. But of course the deaths, overwhelmed hospitals, etc. would be horrific.

Instead, we're trying to "flatten the curve" in most countries. This means we're directly trying to lower the doubling time, which means that we won't develop herd immunity the same way. Lots of pockets of never-infecteds will exist where COVID can crop up again.

I'd also caution estimating based on current "confirmed case" counts. Almost every country has suffered from test shortages, and even those that haven't had shortages haven't been testing everyone -- in most cases, if you aren't having trouble breathing, you're advised to just stay at home and assume you're infected. So honestly nobody knows just how many people are infected.

[JoeAltmaier]

Flattening surely is not going to work if everybody eventually get sick from this. We'd need 3M beds for a month each patient. Divide that by the number we have, it'd take 20 years of 'flattening' to make that work.

No, the reason to try and delay is only to give time for vaccines, better processes and treatments. That's the only path forward.

And it isn't happening fast enough. So there will be some suffering.