Originally Posted by
EastsideAl
The problem is that this thing is both non-threatening to most people, and that it is deadly or requires long-term intensive treatment for a not insignificant percentage of those who get it. It is also clearly highly contagious and pretty easily spread, even by those who are showing few or no symptoms.
So there is a particular danger of it passing from the often asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic young to the very vulnerable elderly and people with certain health problems. Perhaps en masse. Proximity to the carrier or anything they've contacted seems to be the most important factor in spreading it, thus the concentration on reducing crowds and contact. The most important thing is that we just do not have the hospital facilities to deal with the possible number of acute cases in need of intensive care, so better we do what we can to slow its spread now.
The fact that the feds have botched up the testing [[look over there at Canada, where they can now run thousands of tests a day to our hundreds), and that there are clearly many thousands more people out there carrying and potentially spreading the virus than we know about, makes it doubly imperative that we undergo some short-term suffering and inconvenience now to stop the potential for a much larger disaster.
Yes, it may all seem like an over-reaction, and if they're successful and only hundreds or a couple thousand die rather than many more, a lot of people will probably complain that they don't understand what all that fuss was about. But the people I know in the medical community, many of whom are normally quite blase, are much more spooked by the potential of this coronavirus than anything I've ever seen.