this other thread
https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/dr-who-wrong.342026/
my estimation would be even lower around 0.1% death on the population, based on Wuhan with 10m residents and about 3000 dead. Wuhan is basically a full population infection scenario where patient 0 was 2 months before the city shut down was implemented... so if you extrapolate and say 10000 would die if nothing was done at all other than basic quarantine like you are sick don't go to school/work to sneeze on everyone.
People are morons so they panic with no perspective. say 0.1% of US population dies from this, that's 350000.. in 2018 we had 80000 dead from the flu.... so Corona is flu on steroids.... but why was there zero panic in 2018. the market dropped a couple of times in 2018 but for unrelated reasons.
yes you can argue the Government has limited ability to tackle. but what is the correct approach anyway?
then you have the media machine throwing fuel on the fire. in this case ironically the state controlled media in China worked better as everything was a rally call to pump up the population's morale.
then about the shut-downs and social distancing and the economic effects.
you say well 350000 is a lot bigger than 80000 and if we can save a lot of lives why don't we shut down the economy for that.... this is a slightly bigger topic.
first of all human life is not priceless.. otherwise we would have to ban all cars without airbags and put missle defense systems on all passenger airplanes.... and heck ban all cars all together since they kill 100 per day in the US and severely injure another 300 or so.
insurance companies value human lives at $2m per, give or take, for risk calculation. say if this whole thing is a 5% GDP drag on the US $20T, that equates to about 500,000 death on the economic loss. you can do similar calculations for any other countries and the conclusions will be about the same.. so the domestic GDP loss is already bigger than the lives saved.
not to mention the soft damage to the quality of life due to the shut downs. all the people suffering hardship due to loss of income.
not to mention, since the same premium can buy far less insurance for old people then the young, you can argue old lives worth less..... but of course that kind of argument will never fly in politics.
not to mention, this is only domestic damage. very few will die from starvation in the US or Europe due to corona. but the economic slow down will have a huge impact on the 3rd world countries many of which rely on exports of goods/services... you can be sure a large number of people will die there due to the economic hardship.
so the 'people are morons' argument.... it's a bit long to unwind... first of all the panic is completely irrational, and it takes some math to explain why even the shut-downs and social distancing is not necessarily the right way to deal with it.
flu on steroids... that's the term I have been using.