> - Hongkong and Palau has much worse eating wild animal habit than Wuhan.

Curious how you get this impression, do you have specific examples in mind? For example, bats, wolves and civet cats are consumed in Wuhan, which is not the case in Hong Kong.

> - Hundreds of Wuhan gov officials got punished due to inefficient response, more investigation is still continuing.

On the flip side, I wonder how the cases for the eight whistleblowers reprimanded by local authorities, including Li Wenliang, are being investigated. More importantly, the real question is: does it actually solve the problem? Replacing officials (especially the local ones) is easy, solving the root cause (lack of accountability) is hard.

> Curious how you get this impression, do you have specific examples in mind? For example, bats, wolves and civet cats are consumed in Wuhan, which is not the case in Hong Kong.

There you go. Even in Guam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_as_food

Australians eat crocodiles and kangaroos. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/australian-food/index.htm...

The estimated IFR for this coronavirus is ~.05 to 0.1%. Even if it turns out to be something extreme, like 0.5%, it's not a big deal for the vast, vast majority of the population. But lockdowns and economic catastrophe are. They are a big deal for everyone. In this case the needs of the many are being overridden by the needs of the few.

If the shutdowns/lockdowns go for more than 4 weeks, I think we'd have been better off just letting the disease run wild. More people will die from the economic issues at that point. Might be too late already.

The numbers are higher than that. From Wikipedia today:

> "The case fatality rate (CFR) depends on the availability of healthcare, the typical age and health problems within the population, and the number of undiagnosed cases. Preliminary research has yielded case fatality rate numbers between 2% and 3%; in January 2020 the WHO suggested that the case fatality rate was approximately 3%, and 2% in February 2020 in Hubei. Other CFR numbers, which adjust for differences in time of confirmation, death or remission but are not peer reviewed, are respectively 7% and 33% for people in Wuhan 31 January. An unreviewed preprint of 55 deaths noted that early estimates of mortality may be too high as asymptomatic infections are missed. They estimated a mean infection fatality ratio (IFR, the mortality among infected) ranging from 0.8% to 0.9%. A peer-reviewed article published on 19 March estimated the overall symptomatic case fatality risk as 1.4% (IQR 0.9–2.1%). The outbreak in 2019–2020 has caused at least 335,974 confirmed infections and 14,641 deaths."

Current predictions are that letting the disease run wild would result in millions or tens of millions of deaths, and on top of that another large number of people walking around (slowly) with serious lung damage. Consider this:

> "The Hong Kong Hospital Authority found a drop of 20% to 30% in lung capacity in some people who recovered from the disease, and lung scans suggested organ damage."

There is a stream of academic papers coming out that show the original estimates are extremely high. I’ve seen CFR estimates getting into the 0.6% range. It is not at all unreasonable to see that number go down even further with more testing.

If they are estimates, it's not at all unreasonable to see the number go down or up.

But in any case, the CFR estimates are also changing as a function of learning more about how to treat, and hospital capacity relative to caseload.

I was replying about the "let it rip through the population" scenario, without slowing it down, which basically means don't treat the majority of severe cases in hospital (because the hospitals would be totally overwhelmed in that scenario). The CFR would be higher.