No one knows what the infection rate is. On the diamond princess, maybe the one completely controlled scenario we have, I believe around 25% caught the virus. For an environment much more condensed than normal life, it's pretty hard to believe 50%+ infection rate. But if we don't know, why not be super over-reactive just in case? Well, because there's a great penalty to pay for doing that. The longer we go with this level of panic and lockdown, the worse the recession (depression?).
Common sense suggests it's more or less a flu. On any given year you could generate similar fear and numbers looking at the regular old flu. If you look at this study
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285
a couple years ago Italy had 25k flu deaths over the winter season. Assuming a 6 month winter season, that'd be around 1000 deaths a week for 6 months straight on average. I'm sure there were weeks much worse than 1000 deaths. Yet reports of Italy on unprecedented healthcare collapse were coming out before there were even 1400 total Corona deaths.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything or that it doesn't have the potential to be bad, I'm pointing out that over-reacting is certainly not free, this is something we need to balance as best we can.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285
Just read the Results section of the abstract. A few years ago Italy had 24k flu deaths over the winter season. With a winter season of 6 months, that's an average of almost 1000 flu deaths per week for 6 months straight. Italy's hospitals were reportedly in crisis mode a week ago when the total Corona deaths were less than 1400. Can you explain this to me? Does that make sense to you?
Italy has 1400 deaths, 21,000 cases according to this
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
There was a study done on Italy and the flu for several years in the mid 2010s,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285
They had flu deaths of 7k, 15k, 20k, 24k in four years during the study. I'm just looking at the data. The numbers don't seem to add up to support the idea that Italy is in some severe collapse scenario.
Now maybe Corona is about to get a lot worse in Italy, maybe this thing is ramping up really fast, it doesn't really look like that in tracking new cases in Italy over the last few days, but maybe. But that's still a future threat, and yet we're being told that Italy is already in really bad shape. Doesn't seem to add up.
Gtfo