https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/15/the-real-threats-from-coronavirus/
Social distancing is nothing compared to a crisis that leads to mass casualties, economic collapse, and a legacy of bad policies that leaves the country weaker than ever before.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that Americans must prepare to “hunker down” to avoid a worst-case scenario with the rapid spread of the Chinese coronavirus. Nevertheless, plenty of skeptics are asking if coronavirus is “something” or if it is “nothing.” That’s the wrong question to ask. And asking the wrong question leads you to the wrong answers.
Of course it is something, but what is it? That’s the question we need to answer.
I know that people reading this will fall broadly into two groups. The first group, which is strongly represented among political conservatives, maintains that coronavirus is nothing or, if not precisely nothing, then it is asymptotically approaching nothing. For them, it is as real as the Fusion GPS dossier on President Trump.
Then there is the other group. These are people who are concerned that an outbreak in one or more American cities that goes undetected and thus uncontained for too long could cause a repeat of the Wuhan or Northern Italy scenario. Those scenarios followed roughly the same pattern: the virus went largely undetected due to a lack of testing capacity and soon became widespread before public health officials could act.
This led to a surge in hospitalizations that overloaded existing resources and spiked the number of fatalities as well as the fatality rate. That’s why the delay in increasing testing capacity in the United States until the past few days has been a cause for concern. The Wuhan virus should not have a high mortality rate, but when left unnoticed and thus unchecked it can spread and lead to deaths of people who would be able to recover if they’d had proper treatment.
The scenes from Italy have been horrible. By Sunday, Italy had nearly 25,000 confirmed cases, more than 1,800 deaths—and 368 of those deaths came in the prior 24 hours. That single-day death toll exceeds the worst day China ever reported.