vzuvz

5.7% was probably referring to fatality rate.

It is extremely irresponsible to say this is not a big threat. At this rate, the death toll of Covid19 in the US is up to as big as 4 times the seasonal flu. In some countries the mortality will end up being more than 0.8%. Almost 1 in every 100 people dying because of a virus seems like a big threat to me, and it is already clear that this will be way bigger than the Swine Flu.

What would you qualify as a big threat?

In case there are any CS PhD students at top colleges in the US reading this, I'd appreciate some advice: I am currently applying for a PhD in Germany (RWTH), and although I am excited about that place, I think I'd rather do a PhD in a top US School (for a couple of reasons that I won't detail here). The thing is that admissions for US schools do not seem to start before September, and in case I get accepted in Germany I'd have to decide whether to accept or not without having the opportunity to even apply for American schools. My question is about whether I'd have a decent shot of getting into such programs or not. Because if I don't then it makes sense to take an opportunity somewhere else before even applying there.

My relevant credentials are: I'm currently doing my Ms. Sc. at University of Chile, and have published the following papers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10000 (accepted at FUN2020) https://ioinformatics.org/journal/v10_2016_19_37.pdf (IOI2016) https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11693 (ICDT2020) https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3329486.3329498 (Workshops DEEM2019 and AMW2019), and I'm currently preparing what will be my master thesis to be submitted to a conference as well.

Does this look like a solid enough profile to get a decent shot at a top US PhD program?