We have months of data now. If the virus gets out of control; countries find that out because the hospital system gets overwhelmed and they have to bring in a hard quarantine.

Countries have to overreact to the circumstances that they are confronted with because in a week the situation will be much worse if they don't. The only options are to overreact when everything seems fine or to overreact when the hospitals are full past capacity.

The choices here are to overreact before the virus gets past the border; overreact when the first cases appear; overreact when the first cluster is identified or overreact when people who can't breath are being turned away from hospitals. We have yet to see what happens past that point because so far everyone has instituted a quarantine then. Germany is at the clusters developing stage.

I don't think you are using "overreact" properly. If it's the appropriate response, then, by definition, is not overreacting.

In line with what you are saying, a problem, is that the proper reaction, if works, looks like an overreaction later. So, politically, there is an incentive to do nothing.

This kind of thinking is exactly the mistake China and Italy did. Please, I beg you to learn from our errors.

It does sound extremely over the top indeed, but it might be the only way to prevent the spreading. It appears that by the time you find the first case, you are too late as the virus has been spreading all over the place. Maybe quarantining everybody, even from area with zero cases, is too much... but at least people should make a strong effort to reduce social activities for a few months.

The only realistic way to stop the virus from looking at other countries responses is to overreact relative to what other countries have done

Well, let's just wait for a million dead like they expect in Italy then... that would be a proper, timid, reaction...

You just pulled that number out of your ass, didn't you?

Andrea Ricciardi, Professor of Hygiene and adviser to the Ministry of Health: "The most frightening point is the pitted figures on how much the virus can spread. the curves of the graphs elaborated by the epidemiologists and not only in Italy: according to the models, it could strike until 60% of the population, which means that according to the mortality rates there could be a million deaths only in Italy."

Feel happy now about the ad-hominem?

Here's another, this time for the US:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/up-to-150-million-americans-...

This is coming from 3.4% mortality rate from reported cases, but how many are not reported? How many people just suffer a mild cold, or are completely asymptomatic and never get reported? As an overall mortality rate, it is almost certainly too high.

That's a huge number. Where did you get it from ?

See my answer to the parent comment.

Please, stop throwing around totally fake numbers like that.

Italy has a population of 60 million.

The WHO reports "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died".

If 50% the population gets infected, and if it's not 3.4% but "just" 3% mortality rate, that's already 1 million dead.

And according to some experts, even 70% infection rate is predicted.

Second, this 3.4% percentage of deceased patients, is at the early stages, with fewer patients and preventive measures (so that most patients that needed hospital treatment got it).

A 10% or more of patients of COVID-19 will need hospital treatment and ICU. As the number of patients rise, there wont be as many ICU units (and doctors are getting infected themselves at an alarming rate).

In Italy with ~ 7000 cases, "hospitals are scrambling to increase the number of beds available in intensive care units. Some have closed entire wards to dedicate them to severe coronavirus cases. Others have transformed operating rooms into intensive care units. Doctors are working grueling shifts to cover for colleagues who fall ill".

Let's put it this way, they have 9,172 cases and 463 deaths.

Now imagine with 100,000 or 1,000,000 cases -- still very far from the predicted 70%.

That's not how epidemics work. Even China was nowhere near these numbers. Stuff like that doesn't spread the way you assume it does.

But ok, the source is your own calculations. Thanks for confirming.

>That's not how epidemics work.

That's not how epidemics work when they are contained quickly.

Europe has done a bad job at this.

Epidemics in the past have killed many times as many as the percentages above.

Different diseases, different outcomes.

First, using the total population as a basis is just wrong. Some will certainly be immune to a certain degree while others are simply lucky.

Even very aggressive pandemics, hitting totally ill-prepared societies didn't infect every single person. Not even the black death managed to do so. So why do you think COVID-19 would end up doing that?

And using the 3.4% is another issue. Because you have the Wuhan rate, which is much higher than the rate eslewhere. And this thing is a moving target because testing was rather limted earlier. South Korea seems to be the best source to get mortalitiy rates due to their aggressive testing.

Andrea Ricciardi, Professor of Hygiene and adviser to the Ministry of Health: "The most frightening point is the pitted figures on how much the virus can spread. the curves of the graphs elaborated by the epidemiologists and not only in Italy: according to the models, it could strike until 60% of the population, which means that according to the mortality rates there could be a million deaths only in Italy."

right now in italy it's more like 8% fatality rate

south korea is an outlier and most of their cases are not resolved, they may have a lot of false positives

time to act was weeks ago.

No, thats beeing responsible.