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The vast majority of reported cases remain sick in hospital beds. Too sick to release, not dead yet....

Exactly. You can’t sensibly calculate a mortality rate without knowing of how many got sick, how many recovered and how many died. The equation dead/sick is not the mortality rate until you can determine that the remainder are not going to die from it. Currently we have the problem both that the Chinese do not appearing to be reporting all of their sick (and perhaps their dead), and that the infection rate is expanding so quickly that few appear to have recovered from the illness. Excepting the first issue there, the mortality rate is *somewhere* between 2% and 60%. But we can’t disregard the first issue.

The really concerning part is that the Chinese are going completely nuts, which having no real anchor point is a tendency, while they also certainly know more than we do about what is going on.

The basic response is to recognize there is a lot of uncertainty, recognize the types of uncertainty, and take basic precautions such as trying to limit contact with unknown groups, and have enough food so that you don’t HAVE to go out if things start to get out of hand here. One should not, however, assume things are out of hand here and get all paranoid.