I'm not saying that the reaction wasn't warranted initially when we had no idea how bad the disease was. What I'm saying is the level of panic, especially now, is totally unjustified. The hoarding canned goods and battening down the hatches. Insane relative to risk.
And I'm asking you, with the number of infection doubling daily in countries that don't batten down the hatches, or quarantine because everyone should just get back to work as you said -- what is the acceptable number of deaths before quarantine is acceptable?
~20-50K deaths in the US according to the CDC in the last few months alone [1] and 95K worldwide [2] targeting up to 650K/yr from the CDC and WHO. And I did answer the question you asked: there's no hard and fast rule but it's fair to say that we should respond to threats based on the threat they pose, and use similar threats as a baseline.
FWIW, case numbers don’t double every day, they grow by 10 to 20% every day, thus doubling every week or half week, thus growing by an order magnitude every two to three weeks.
That's if you ignore all the people who recover completely and are released from hospital. We're still down ~20% from peak number of active open cases (47K open vs 58K peak).
Not the question I asked, and it's convenient that you didn't provide a citation for that stat, because you well know that was the worst flu season in 40 years, AND it wasn't "this year".
