Indeed. I was organizing some people to make face shields and was looking for a big room. When I talked to the city about using a school gym, one of the criteria was that everyone needed to have background checks. Because it would be in a school!
The millions of people who would die in a worst-case scenario are mainly demographics that society is already used to neglecting: the elderly, the terminally ill, those with lifelong chronic illnesses where any infection could be a killer, etc.
Therefore, I would expect this to continue to be considered more of a peacetime inconvenience than a real war. A frequent response to this is, "But they could overwhelm the healthcare system so you or me couldn't be treated for our needs!" Well, if the bulk of the population is left inconvenienced and unemployed for too long, I can imagine some ugly scenarios where the population demands, broadly speaking, that those demographics simply be triaged out of treatment so that they don't overwhelm the healthcare system for everyone else. This is said to be already happening in Italy to a degree.
People imagining such triaging seem to think that a willingness to be appalling brutal means such brutality could be achieved with limited costs.
Italy's situation is far from the worst-case scenario. It's death rate is not that much higher than a seasonal flu, it's just the death-process that is far more messy.
Which is to say, let the infection rate get high enough and you'll have hospitals crowded with the young and healthy even if carry the old directly to the morgue.
Moreover, authorities shouting "all clear" in the midst of this dreck isn't going just summon a phalanx of consumers ready to go to restaurants, death chance or not.
In short, just because you're evil doesn't mean you aren't stupid too.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#case-fatality-rate-of...
If you read my parent post in context, I hope it's clear that I mean currently in Italy, people are not dying at a rate higher than the seasonal flu BUT this has a big potential change if the infection rate were to shoot up (we know this is prevented by extreme quarantine measures, enforced by the army).
The flu is a well-enough study disease that they're able to, relatively accurately, model population statistics based on a sub-set of tested patients.
We have spent decades holding people systemically dis-incentivizing people from doing positive things in bad situations by assigning responsibility in this perverse "who was the last one to touch it" manner. Society has made its bed and now it gets to lay in it. Nobody is gonna be the one that bucks the trend and reduces and sort of real or perceived safety standard in order to increase volume of care until the situation becomes so obviously bad that not doing so is indefensible.
There are news reports right now on HN on how the real death rate on countries that are not falsifying reports might be up to 4 times the assumed rate.
The hypothesis is supported by the increase in total deaths compared with the baseline, and after subtracting deaths linked to covid19.
This being true, we might be looking into 2 to 4% of the population.
Link to the HN thread:
Right now, the death rate still isn't higher than a flu epidemic but just the number of known infections promises a lot worse and the potential doublings after that are terrifying.
It seems like there's an endless dialogue of:
A: How would you accomplish X? B: I wouldn't, X is not what I do.
But we need to give the final answer: A: I didn't ask whether you can do X. I'm telling you, "do X or many people die, you are all we have at this point. Think outside the box".