From a friend of mine who is an infectious disease scientist @ MIT:
"Another note on the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.
MIT has cancelled all events with >125 people and prohibited all international business travel. Stanford is moving to all-online classes. Why such extreme measures despite so few deaths so far?
The goal is to slow the burn of the pandemic. There is no preexisting immunity to COVID-19, so many or most of us will get infected with it at some point. This is a reality we are unlikely to avoid. So far, the numbers (including from countries with huge operations for detecting mild cases) suggest that >10% of infected people require hospitalization. If we can slow the spread, we can avoid overwhelming our hospitals. If we exceed the capacity of hospitals, the death rate will be elevated above the estimated 0.5%-2% of cases. People will begin to die from unrelated and treatable causes, due to lack of hospital capacity.
Why are we seeing such alarm now, more than anything we can remember? This virus appears to have a unique combination of infectiousness and lethality. While mathematical estimates of these features are hard to nail down in the early stages of a pandemic, it is very likely that this is the worst combination of infectiousness and lethality that the world has seen since 1918 Spanish flu. Note that these lethality estimates of >0.5% are much worse than seasonal flu and are coming from countries with good healthcare. (It remains possible that many infections are so asymptomatic that they are impossible to detect even with surveillance, but it will take time to do the serotests to make this determination.)
The good news is that we live in a modern era, where we can prepare. We can enhance hand hygiene, decrease travel, lower exposure, and use teleconferencing solutions to replace some features of large gatherings. Infectiousness is a property of our behavior, as well as of the virus itself. Another bright spot is that this virus does not appear to have high lethality rates in children and young people.
This is all to say -- I think the attached graphic is fantastic. It nicely explains the goal of public health measures. We can't prevent this pandemic from infecting a huge number of us, but we can save lives by slowing its burn."
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