The reason for all of this panic is that when you don’t “flatten the curve” on this illness, the hospitals become overwhelmed. When they are forced to triage like they are in Italy based on limited hospital beds and limited ventilators (ventilators also being an issue in the US) that’s when you see the higher mortality rates. The US has a high number of people with cardiac disease, obesity, and these people are high risk as well as anyone over 60.

When a country reacts appropriately, such as South Korea, they have a very good rate of recovery as well as a decline in new cases. Their hospitals are able to treat each patient appropriately.

This isn’t really about us. This is about the immunocompromised and old people and the medical staff who will die caring for them if this (when?) this gets out of control in the US. The sheer number of cases, which statistically double every day, will overwhelm the healthcare system. (See: Italy.)

We (the US) likely should have taken our medicine and shut everything down for a few weeks but instead we have conducted 0.7% the number of promised tests and have a lot of community spread cases that are unrelated to people visiting foreign countries. Places who took drastic measures are starting their journey back to normal while the rest of us are advised to stay in, which appears to mean building a toilet paper fort.

This could kill a lot of people, especially the lack of data.