I'm curious about the behaviour of the very old in Wuhan right now, with other people's regular activity going back to something more like normal (If I've heard that correctly), are the older-but-healthy still staying home too? Whatever the details are, looking to their experience in Wuhan as the disease progresses ahead of the western world's experience is useful for thinking about these things.

well first, you'd avoid threads like this that throw trumped-up early/misleading numbers around to scare the crap out of people. but realize that everyday risks, like getting into a car, are non-trivial too (~1 in 100 lifetime risk of dying in a car accident), but we do them anyway.

more to the point, epidemiologists will eventually reach concensus that the infection rate is under control (close to linear, R0≈1, i imagine). most 80+ year olds might need to stay cautious for the rest of their lives (depending on both the actual epidemiology and treatment/prevention options we develop), but that's true of a wide array of threats, like cancer, heart disease, or even just falling.

so basically, it depends on your risk tolerance once we have enough information to determine the actual risks of dying (vs the guestimates we have so far).

We should have a vaccine sometime next year.

Yeah, everyone is criticizing China for hiding numbers early on. Why is nobody criticizing the politicians in the rest of the world who weren't even authorizing testing?