Originally Posted by
lazygun37
I really wish that everybody who thinks this is all one big over-reaction would carefully read the modelling paper I linked to above. Have any of you? It's this analysis, I believe, that has led both UK and US governments to adjust course in the last couple of days.
For anybody who really tries to digest what is being said there, it is brutal reading.
I also wish people would stop citing small current numbers as if they were evidence for this whole thing being overblown. It is in the nature of exponential growth that we find it hard to wrap our heads around it. In the exponential growth phase, the number of people infected by this virus doubles every ~5 days. Take the current number of cases and work out on a piece of paper how many you'll have in 1 month, 2 months or 3 months. And remember that nobody has any true immunity against this yet. Even if you optimistically assume that some significant fraction of the population never become symptomatic, the numbers are likely to be overwhelming. And asymptomatic people may still be carriers.