People are panicking about this to an unbelievable extent. It's a bad disease, to be sure, and some precautions should be taken, but it's not worth putting the entire economy on hold. For example, maybe it'd be a good idea to 100% lock-down nursing homes, but cancelling all university classes and sporting events, or locking down entire countries, or stopping trade between the biggest economies in the world? I think we'll look back at this in a couple of years and see this as a huge hypochondriacal overreaction which kicked off quite a damaging recession. (Though the economy was already unstable in many ways: it's not just the virus.)
Agreed. They're going way overboard with this. Barely anyone is dying here especially when you compare it to other things like the flu. Keep calm and carry on in my opinion. If it goes full on zombie apocalypse then we can stay inside but doing this shit now is overkill and incredibly damaging in multiple ways. There's only been about 50 deaths so far in the UK. Flu kills about 50 a day, 20 people kill themselves every day and there's 450 die of cancer every day just in the UK but nobody's going hysteric over them. This is going to do do ridiculous damage to the economy which could take years to recover from and lots of business are going to go under, especially ones like airlines. I have a friend who's a self-employed personal trainer and pretty much all of his clients have cancelled this week already out of fear. He'll be out of business within the month if this continues.
(I recently had all of the symptoms of the virus. I wonder if I had it, or if it was just the ordinary flu. It was very unpleasant, though I got over it in a few days.)
I get really bad throat infections with flu-like symptoms a few times a year and they're very unpleasant for a few days to a week but as with the flu young/healthy people will likely get over it. It just seems to be mostly killing the already nearly-dead with underlying health conditions anyway and they're probably the ones that need to self-isolate unless it starts killing anyone else.
Look at Italy.
It's not like the flu. CFR is much higher, it's more contagious, and even though ~80% of sick people might have mild symptoms like above, the ones that are not so lucky may require intensive care. If it spreads uncontained it can overwhelm the healthcare system. The goal is now to flatten the curve to keep the system working for those who need it and staying at home for a few weeks is a small price to pay.
Bravado among predominantly young healthy members of this forum is understandable. That doesn't work for those who have a high risk of complications from this virus unless you want to go full Darwin on them and just let them die. I'm kinda attached to a couple high-risk family members so I'm glad that schools and other virus-breeding places around here are closed. Unfortunately testing is still severely lacking but there are some drive-through testing places popping up so hopefully it'll pick up soon.