I was thinking the same two weeks ago, than reality hit me, the US is early in the development of the pandemic and the growth is still exponential so every 2-3 days the number of reported cases and deaths duplicate and without lock down it will keep growing until 70% of the population will have been infected (herd immunity point). This is an educated opinion based on data provided by epidemiologists. I avoid the media and only get my information from scientists.
and you are right when you say it is not the plague, but with free diffusion of the virus the numbers will be very high.
Everyone in the US is already infected. It is a non-starter. Most people are asymptomatic, like they are with the flu every year. Let's call it 80%.
That's 300+ million people infected with the flu with no symptoms.
If last year they pulled that shit on TV, it would have been the same thing. Mass hysteria, hoarding Zycam, Alka-Seltzer sales gone wild!
We, as a globe, are mostly infected with the thing by now. If they would simply stop testing people, they would have less reported cases on the CNN forever-virii-weblog-of-the-television.
Day in and day out, non-stop coverage of a virus infecting the people of the world, with tick-by-tick counters of the number of people tested.
Why did they never do this for Influenza-A, or the Measles, or Mumps, or Malaria, or Zika, or whatever?
Italy Lockdown March 9th, 19days on, 22nd March did show a reduction in new cases, but since it's been stable at that level, should drop considerably, so maybe a 14-21 days to get symptoms so 7 days needed, or XX days ??
Which supports China maxed out then dropped off.
the first two weeks of lock down are needed to separate infected from uninfected at household level, after that you have the member of an infected household getting the virus from the infected member, so another 2 weeks at the very least are needed to see the plateau. after that you need to keep social distancing in place but you can slowly start to release the lock down, provided that you have built the capability to track new cases, if you don't you start the process once more.
the % of infected in UK and US is at best 0.1%. For instance for the US with over 300M population, the number of official cases is about 115K, the high end of total number of real cases is 10 times more, so over 1M very, very far from 60% of the population.
Also, the main problem and the reason why it is different form the usual flue is that it spread fast and kills 10 to 30 times more causing the collapse of the health system, which in turns increases significantly the death rate. All the lock down and social distancing measures are designed to slow down the pandemic so that the health system can handle the influx of severely compromised patients that will die if not able to access ICU.
So, be prepared, you have not yet seen how bad it will be, you are where Italy was 2 weeks ago, even what you say is what I was saying to weeks ago (in Italy).
believe me when I say I am not exaggerating, just wait a couple of weeks and, unfortunately, you will see for yourself.