Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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^ I agree that panic is something that should be avoided and that a rounded perspective is important; however, I believe having an attitude like I do that it's possible this virus could be more dangerous than we think it is at this point and acknowledging that isn't panic at all.

Yes, that's the problem, we need to act but we know too little.
This is the natural setting for a phenomenon called panic.
And this is what we can observe, on many levels.
Unfortunately, while panic is an adaptive reaction to poorly understood immediate danger, it is counterproductive on the scale of whole societes.

It's just a matter of English semantic. What I see is: when people talk about other people, they use panic, hysteria. When they talk about themselves, they use prudence, vigilant. I have come to learn they mean the same thing. It all just depends on your perspective. Ha!

I think America places it in this paradigm externalizing responsibility when perhaps one is referring to internal mindset and individual initiative. Balance isn't achieved by extremes

It's just a matter of English semantic. What I see is: when people talk about other people, they use panic, hysteria. When they talk about themselves, they use prudence, vigilant. I have come to learn they mean the same thing. It all just depends on your perspective. Ha!

That's pretty deep.
If you link it to ASD... you know that loop of perseveration and anxiety.. That is mitigated if a person knows what is expected, and what their options are, structure/routine. And oftentimes you can't think straight unless someone helps you with that

I sometimes think my everyday toll on mental health makes me better prepared for emergencies. The chaos where everyone panics is my everyday state I've learned to navigate.

How about discussing particular issues and options without following any fixed "*-ism" or "anti-*-ism"?

I don't care for the opinion but for the data it uses, which gives "Source: Comune di Bergamo, L'Eco di Bergamo
Note: 2020 is as of March 26."
The data is coherent with other papers:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN21J677
https://www.ansa.it/english/news/2020/0 ... 70ec5.html
The common source is ISTAT, Italian National Institute of Statistics.
The source pages of ISTAT are unnavigable for me, likely because I don't speak Italian.

I'm not sure how it is a red herring when the discussion was about a very specific image and quote.  I disagreed that it was about capitalism vs. XYZ as it referred to specific choices like not buying nonsense and filling that space with family time.  Giving more value to friends and family simply because right now you are unable to visit them.  Etc.  I think you like to argue and read something in people's response that isn't there.  As for alternatives don't ask someone as uneducated as me.

So in Washington Sate it was announced that schools will remain closed at least until the fall semester.

As we have seen in Italy, in some towns, the number of deaths is more than 4 times, as compared to last year's number. What does this mean? It means a lot of people died at home, either from COVID-19 or from other illnesses. The health system was overwhelmed, so I don't think they did any postmortem sampling to check who had the virus.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/02/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-likely-much-higher-than-reported/

By now, we are pretty sure this virus is at very least twice as deadly as seaonal flu, and most likely 4 times as deadly.

So, I did a quick calculation. If we take the mortality rate as 0.4% (four times the mortality rate of seasonal flu), then we can infer how many people are truly infected with COVID-19 in Italy. Bear with me a bit. There are currently 16,523 deaths in Italy, according to WorldOMeters. However, this figure lags behind the confirmed cases. So, we have to extrapolate a bit, like by 7 days or so. Italy's death doubling period is currently around 15 days. So in another 7 days the multiplicative factor is around 1.4 (the square root of 2). The number additional deaths not reported in hospitals is a factor 3~4 in heavily hit towns. Let's be conservative and use a factor 2.5 for the entire country. So, we can infer the total number of people in Italy infected with COVID-19 as

16,523*2.5*1.4/0.004 = 14.5 million people

Italy has a population of 60 million people. This means 24% of the population has already been infected. So, there is no surprise to see that "herd immunity" has started to kick in. For COVID-19, given that R0~3, to achieve herd immunity, you need 1-1/R0=67% of people having immunity. I think the 24% figure is consistent with what we see in the situation in Italy: number of cases starting to dwindling down fast, due to partial herd immunity.

In other words, I believe there is some basis to suspect that the true mortality rate of COVID-19 is 0.4%, or four times deadlier that the seasonal flu.