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.