Business Insider writers didn’t notice; added alarmist conjecture from CDC and NYT; also pointed to origin of Lipsitch’s original conjecture - a podcast with Harvard’s Noah Feldman (of impeachment fame?):
14 Mar: Business Insider: Multiple experts say up to 70% of Americans could be infected with the coronavirus and 1 million could die if no treatment is found — so people over 60 should ‘stay home unless it’s critical’
by Aylin Woodward, Anna Medaris Miller
Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told the “Deep Background” (with Noah Feldman, Harvard) podcast on February 28 that the coronavirus could affect between 40 and 70% of the world’s adult population – about 3 billion people...
Four disease scenarios, modelled in February by experts at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suggested between 160 million and 214 million people in the US could get infected within a year. Between 200,000 and 1.7 million Americans could die, according to a New York Times report...
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/coronavirus-150-million-americans-may-get-infected-2020-3?r=US&IR=T
CBS got the ball rolling, but no-one noted the final paragraphs excerpted below:
2 Mar: CBS: Coronavirus may infect up to 70% of world’s population, expert warns
CBS News spoke to one of the country’s top experts on viruses, Marc Lipsitch from Harvard University, who cautions that 40-70% of the world’s population will become infected — and from that number, 1% of people who get symptoms from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, could die...
Jim Axelrod: So, the number that I think is grabbing a lot of people is this estimate: 40-70% of the world’s adult population could be infected.
Marc Lipsitch: Yes.
Axelrod: Accurate?
Lipsitch: That is a projection, so we will find out if it’s accurate as things go on. It is the best estimate that I’ve been able to make based on a combination of the mathematical models that we use to track and predict epidemics...
Lipsitch: This is not an existential threat. This is, qualitatively, it’s very much like a bad pandemic of influenza, which we experienced arguably twice or three times in the 20th Century. It’s worse than the one that we experienced in 2009. But none of those brought civilization close to its knees. They made things awful for a while.
Axelrod: And this won’t either?
Lipsitch: And this will not either.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-worldwide-virus-expert-warning-today-2020-03-02/
enter a giant:
17 Mar: StatNews: A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
By John P.A. Ioannidis
At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected...
How long, though, should measures like these (lockdowns) be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?...
The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable...
This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future...
Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%...
A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat...
If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.”...
In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns...
One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.
In the most pessimistic scenario, which I do not espouse, if the new coronavirus infects 60% of the global population and 1% of the infected people die, that will translate into more than 40 million deaths globally, matching the 1918 influenza pandemic...
Conversely, with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.
If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/