[Chief Pagan]

Originally Posted by DaFace

I think it's just an issue with people believing something could be true that's so unprecedented. If you read back in the first couple thousand posts in this thread, we had plenty of people (myself included, to some extent) who basically felt like this was just gonna be a bad flu season or another SARS 1.0. It was just incomprehensible that we'd literally have to shut down society for this.

Hell, my brother in law was adamant a week ago that this was all still way overblown. Unfortunately for him, he's a mechanic for the Denver FD, and they just had 9 guys test positive...

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Originally Posted by DaFace

The issue with those stats is that they only cover the percent of people who were SEEN AND TREATED. It's been reported that this thing can be carried by people showing no symptoms or only mild symptoms, and it's likely that those kinds of cases actually make up the vast majority of people "infected."

The real death rate is almost certainly well below 1%, and it might be more like 0.00001%, especially once we start including areas where the medical response is prepared and better equipped than rural China.

Originally Posted by Chief Pagan

Ok. Fair enough.

But it is hard to talk about low probability but high consequence events without generating hysteria and then a backlash to the hysteria.

Coronavirus is new to humans. Nobody has any previous immunity. So the number of people who could contract it is way higher than the seasonal flu.

It is unlikely but still plausible that half the world’s population could contract it over the next year. Even a 0.1% fatality rate would be 4 million people.

That on top of the panic it would cause would be really serious.

Worst case scenarios should be calmly considered and contingency plans made as appropriate.

Originally Posted by DaFace

But that's the whole issue - it's a low probability event that is getting a HUGE amount of media attention and is now bordering on causing mass hysteria. There's a chance we'll get hit by a massive asteroid in the next year and all of humanity will be wiped out. Don't think I'll change my vacation plans just yet, though.