It’s when/if the ICU beds start to fill up. Cases = Tests. More tests, more cases. But if they are not serious—most are not—then the concern level should remain low.
The problem is the media (and folks here too) do not have brains that can comprehend degrees of anything. Those minds are either all in, or all out. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way.
In our county today they just logged our 175th. Wuhan Flu death.
Did I mention that our county’s population is 1.22 million?
And that nearly 2/3 of those victims were in nursing homes?
Turning “flattening the curve” into a nation-wide lock-down with no definite end in sight nor clearly expressed goals for opening back up went a long way in creating the all-in (anything to beat the ‘rona)/all-out (this is nuts) mentality. It had other unforseen consequences that we are now living through.
Quarantining the healthy, productive, and law-abiding comes across less like deliberate, considerate, and measured action in controlling the spread of the virus and more like an over-reaction to the pandemic or thinly-disguised tool for controlling the movements of the population.