1. We don't know the actual reality of what's happening on the ground in China. Hubei and Italy have approximately the same population, yet Italy is suffering more proportionally. I think the obvious explanation is drastic underreporting of cases and fatalities in China. When all is said and done I think China probably has underreported by at least a magnitude if not double that.
2. Most Western countries won't impose the type of strategies that China undertook; they simply can't. When things get too bad to impose draconian quarantines, it'll be too late. Even Italy's efforts in quarantining the nation are not enough.
3. Most of the world doesn't have good healthcare. I'm talking about Africa, Southwest Asia, South America. There simply aren't enough ICU beds and ventilators to go around. Even in the US, I've read reports of only 100K ventilators nationwide. If the pandemic keeps growing exponentially with a doubling period of 4 days, the US alone will have 1M cases by mid-April.
4. Simple math. World population outside of China is 6.5B. If 10% are infected (very conservative imho) we're looking at 650M cases world wide. If the CFR drops to 1%, then we're in the neighborhood of 6.5m fatalities. And the survivors? Roughly 81% of those infected survive with no serious side effects. The remainder have serious health issues even after the disease runs its course. That's 117M casualties. This is world altering.
To address (1.) You and others are going to have to provide sources for why you think that China "probably has under-reported by at least a magnitude if not double that". I've seen the ill feeling and distrust towards China increase on HN and elsewhere in the last 5 years and this fits the bill.
You can explain the differences between Hubei and Italy by the differences in responses. As has been pointed out, China built two make-shift hospitals in ~ 10 days and quarantined 100s of millions in cities. Have you not seen the pictures coming out of China. Now that Italy is taking drastic steps we'll see the outcome in a few weeks and it will tell us if it is an effective strategy. If any of the reported numbers is suspect it is the total number of cases that the USA is reporting: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ It's completely out of whack with every other country. This implies the US has been under-testing, something which we have lots of evidence for. On the other hand we have no evidence China is under-reporting.
To address (2.) "Most Western countries won't impose the type of strategies that China undertook; they simply can't." Why not? Why can't they?
To address (3.) "Most of the world doesn't have good healthcare." But most of the world has soap, most of the world understands what it means to self-isolate, most of the world can implement quarantining. "If the pandemic keeps growing exponentially with a doubling period of 4 days," Looks like mitigation strategies slow the doubling period to three weeks, why pick the worst case scenario?
To address (4.) "Simple math." Yes! Times an unknown mitigation factor of ? This outbreak is scary because it's exponential (highly lethal and highly infectious), but the total fatalities is also highly susceptible to interventions exactly for the same reason.
I have no ill feeling towards China other than the fact that they have a repressive, authoritarian government. Those types of government necessarily try to control and spin the news to maintain their authority. If a country is willing to censor Winnie the Pooh to make their leader feel better, than they'll naturally minimize the effect of SARS-Cov2.
I also agree that the US is underreporting due to inadequate testing. Estimates in the US should be closer to 9-10K. I think that we'll see a large spike in cases as soon as testing approaches levels in other countries.
My inclination regarding quarantine controls in Western countries stems from the willingness of these societies to restrict freedoms. Italy's quarantine is very basic, a 1 on a 1-10 level. Compared to what China implemented, it's not even close.
Soap isn't the ability to treat cases; it's a way of trying to mitigate the spread.
We might ballpark the number of global deaths – in the optimistic case† at between 20,000 and 30,000 souls. Not a global tragedy, on a scale of the recent Ebola outbreak, but warranting much more drastic action.
There's a huge sense of urgency. We could have a vaccine before the next flu season in the northern hemisphere.
† assuming not every country acts quickly when the time comes nor acts as effectively as China
That's quite unlikely. We're looking at 12-18 months if everything goes perfectly according to plan and we get it right on the first try.
> nor acts as effectively as China
Only if you take China's numbers at face value, which nobody really seems keen on doing.
China has 1.4 billion people, and they've had ~3,000 deaths (let's assume it's several times higher in reality). But we'll see tens of millions dead globally? No we will not. If you killed every person that has been infected in China, and extrapolated that event globally, we would not see tens of millions dead. So that premise is absurd, to an extreme.
I consider this to be a very serious situation, however, it's not very serious as a great mass mortality threat (unless it mutates and becomes far more deadly and we prove unable to slow it down or vaccinate against it). It's a serious threat for massive disruption to our daily lives, including severely harming the global economy. It's a serious threat to swamping our healthcare systems due to ICU demands and diverting our resources to managing the ongoing crisis (instead of routine, normal productive work).
Assuming this isn't going to burn out come Spring & Summer, the next step is to rush to vaccine, at any cost. That will end this thing globally. Maybe we'll need to vaccinate against it annually, maybe it won't come back after this year, who knows of course.
Tens of millions will not die. Tens of thousands might die in the plausible worst case scenario, before we get a vaccine ready. We can rush to vaccine at greater patient risk and financial cost, as necessary.