I see it. How many would die if we did nothing?
Ask them in Italy and Madrid.
Once hospitals are overrun with CV cases, people die from minor car accidents and coronary episodes etc, because there is not a bed anywhere for them.
So far, the “Just ignore it crowd” (including the leaders of China, Italy, Spain and the UK) become big-time believers when their hospitals are overrun and the bodies start to stack up.
That’s when leaders impose mandatory quarantine for social distancing, to flatten the curve.
So we have not seen a case of just totally letting CV run rampant and unchecked in the first world.
I suspect we will see this in countries without effective leadership or social controls. It’s spreading wild in the Philippines, Thailand is not far behind. Africa will follow. (Warm weather does not stop it, we know that from the Philippines.)
When it explodes in really poor countries, that’s when we’ll see the actual max death rates.
In first world countries, leaders slam the brakes on social interaction once the hospitals are overrun.
New York City is right where Italy was 22 days ago, and Madrid 8 days ago. We started the social distancing earlier in the process than they did (we had their example to study), so we bought some time and flattened the curve somewhat.
But thousands of already-infected people are still going to die in NYC, unless HQ+Zpac turns out to be a magic bullet.
And in the third world, all bets are off, and millions can die for sure. There is no way to practice social isolation in a third-world slum, and their hospitals are primitive adn minimal to begin with.