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Funny. My wife's mother and brother have been seriously ill for a month and her uncle just died from this BS disease.

Assuming this is true (and you'll have to forgive me for not automatically taking as gospel everything I read from anonymous people on the internet), then condolences, but you and your family are a statistical anomaly. I have known of several people and two entire families who have tested positive for this, and the worst symptoms reported were basically a bad cold.

More importantly, I currently live in an area with a huge homeless population and there has been exactly ZERO deaths among these people that I know of (My work is such that I would probably have at least heard about it if any had died). Drug addicts, drunks, and crazy people, most of them. And the hospitals have been ghost towns.

"Assuming this is true (and you'll have to forgive me for not automatically taking as gospel everything I read from anonymous people on the internet), then condolences,..."

Understood. But it is absolutely true.

"... but you and your family are a statistical anomaly. I have known of several people and two entire families who have tested positive for this, and the worst symptoms reported were basically a bad cold."

Which is to be expected. We know that. Most people have mild cases. But it's not a statistical anomaly for some to have serious cases, and some to die.

People have a hard time understanding numbers. With a survival rate of 0.5%, that means if 100 million Americans get this then 500,000 people will die from it. Dismissing it for the 0.5% is missing the point.

It's not even just how many die. On average, people are sick with this a lot longer than they are with the regular flu. And it still seems to be more contagious. If allowed to spread rapidly that means a large number of people very ill at the same time. Again, death rate isn't everything.

There's a lot to take issue with. I'm not saying mandatory shut-downs are good policy, or that strong restraints have come at the right time, or even that we must structure our society to avoid hospital overruns. But it's still a fact, as at has been all along, that if this disease does spread rapidly through the full population there will be some serious consequences. We're still at the point where a small part of the population has contracted. Uncontrolled, that's just the beginning. All we've done is slow it down.