Make no mistake, COVID-19 is likely to become an annual community disease. But it's not going to kill 30 million people until like 2120.
COVID19 spreads by default. If you leave it alone, it will spread uncontrollably. China went from 0 to 79,000 confirmed cases in 2 months, despite running the largest and most extensive quarantine in human history. If there was no quarantine, you could expect truly exponentially higher number of infections.
The problem with these things is, if the rate of spread is >1, then it becomes exponential. That is, if the average person infects more than one person, then the rate of spread is going to get completely out of control. Unless of course, you can impose measures that reduce the rate of spread to below 1.
With coronavirus, it's not possible to do this. The reason is that many people are asymptomatic for weeks, while at the same time passing the virus to other people. If you cannot identify infections before they have the chance to spread at a rate of >1, then the spread of the disease will by default be exponential.
A startup does not grow exponentially by default. Many actions need to be done correctly to continue growing. A business's default state is death.
Sure, but note that they started the strict quarantine protocol after there are already > ten thousand ick people (and many more already exposed).
With coronavirus, it's not possible to do this. The reason is that many people are asymptomatic for weeks, while at the same time passing the virus to other people. If you cannot identify infections before they have the chance to spread at a rate of >1, then the spread of the disease will by default be exponentia
This is mostly speculation, maybe just applying basic things like hand washing, distance measures pushes it to <1 and it dies down eventually? Besides, we have no data about the rate of infection from people who does not show any symptoms (especially coughing).
The field, as a whole, has started talking much more about mitigation, and less about containment, because attempts to intensively trace and isolate cases are only partially holding the line.
That being said, important caveats to all of this is:
- As Marc Lipsitch notes, those estimates don't tell us how many of those cases will be asymptomatic or mild, because we don't have good numbers for that yet. The difference between "Under the weather for a few days" and "Needs respiratory support in an ICU" is obviously massive.
- Epidemic models inherently assume exponential growth (because that's how epidemics work). But that does mean that small perturbations in how we understand how the disease "works" can dramatically chance projections.
They can be wrong, but they are not going to lie.
People educated in those fields with enough renown to claim those positions with a lot to lose for just writing that.
And yes, while they can end being just wrong or spreading fearmongering information, they are the most trusted sources I found
Not really? This is the currently understood state of the science. I would say though that right now several things have broken the "wrong" way in terms of optimistic projections, so it's still possible for the situation to improve.