Some people seem to be bothered by it for months after.
But I'm sure my coworker is wearing a mask for their own set of reasons...
This is never not a good idea, so no time like the present to get into it.
As of yesterday, China, a country of 1.4B, had 80,000 cases and 3,000 dead.
Last year, the US had 36M infected with the flu and 34,000 died.[1]
Are you panicking about the flu?
The reason to not panic but be prepared is that humanity has zero immunity to this virus, whereas there's lots of group immunity to influenza. I'm not sure why it's so hard for people to see the issue here.
It's significantly more deadly than the flu. But also, people should probably take influenza more seriously anyways.
34,000 / 36,000,000 = ~0.00094
36,000,000 * 0.0375 = 1,350,000
That's the concern.
China also had some pretty extreme measures to get their low number of cases, measures I don't think will play out too well in the US. And probably won't have a full count yet.
We can hope for the best, we can wash hands etc., but it's not unrealistic to say this can get bad.
Edit: source added
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/china-coronavirus-covid-19-de...
My point is that based on how many die from the flu each year, you’d have to see 130,000 deaths in China for the impact to be the same as the flu.
The flu infects nearly 20% of the world's population each year. Estimates by the NIH are 10-20% annually in the US, and those numbers are probably similar in other countries. China has a billion people, so that means the flu infects probably 200 million people each year but only 130,000 die. The death rate is below 0.2%.
In contrast, only about 90,000 people have been infected with WCV so far. Thousands have died. The death rate is at 3.8%, or roughly 19-20x higher than the flu.
Check out Spanish Flu for worst case scenario.
China restrictions have been much more stringent than what you imply. People in Wuhan were prevented from leaving their apartments at all and needed to wait for food from the government.
The jury is still out whether softer forms of restrictions can work once the disease is widespread. We will see about that by watching South Korea and Italy. (We know it works if there are not too many cases around, like in Singapore.)
Yeah, that would be bad, but there is no data to suggest it would get that bad.