I'm so tired of all the people on here downplaying this.
Yes, we all know that most people will not die from this virus. But lets look at this from another angle, a trading angle as you say.
Back during the 2008 crisis, with those Mortgage Backed Securities, wasn't it something like only 7% of the mortgages needed to fail before the tranche went belly up? Likewise, you don't need 50% of your population to die to reach some critical mass point where its all chaos. You overload the hospital with a few extra hundred people and you have a major, major problem.
If they didn't lock down, and more people started getting sick, do you not think that people themselves would begin to isolate and socially distance (perhaps even with violence?) There might have been 3, 4, 5 times the number of new cases every day, and at that point, society would begin to break down. Its so plainly obvious to me. You after all only need one fucker to yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater to cause pandemonium. Its far too easy to spook an entire herd.
So lets look at this as traders like you say. We all know that more than 90% of the people who catch this will live. But at what level of death, at what level of fear will society begin to disintegrate? The bet that you're making is kind of binary. If you don't do something and just let it run wild and free, you can't just risk 2% of your account (ie. risk 2% of your society). There is no stop loss once the epidemic is out of control. In the beginning it might just be hundreds of cases, but if what you're preventing is a total breakdown, its like putting your entire account into one trade. Even if your win rate is estimated to be 90% (by doing nothing), you cannot make a trade where you have a 10% chance of losing 100% (meaning that if by doing nothing and losing, your city turns to chaos). You can't just risk one city block, and then quickly change gears to saving the other 99 city blocks. You risk the entire city in one shot, in one trade, by either locking down or not locking down.
This is in fact how the trade for this pandemic works. If you don't social distance and get the curve under control, if you let the hospital system burst, you run the risk of everything falling apart. Your water system might fail. Your electrical grid might fail. There is no telling how bad things can get from mass hysteria. Some Latin countries have dead bodies on the streets. If this started happening in any US city, and the government told the citizens to go about their business as usual, I can assure you that there would be mass chaos.
5 days ahead of the UK.