> Now, you want to keep playing that game.

I am not playing games. This stuff is far too serious to play games over.

> To extrapolate over the general population with the 1.4% case fatality of serious hospital cases, would be wrong and would be fear mongering. The general population does not have a infection rate of 100% nor a case fatality rate of 1.4%.

No, but the Spanish Flu for instance had an infection rate of about 25%, and the general infected population could very well be above that 1.4% (in fact, there is every indication so far that it will end up somewhere between 2 and 3%).

> So the premise is wrong, the assumptions are wrong, and the result are wrong.

The premises isn't nearly as faulty as you make it out to be, it might be off by a factor of four, hopefully much less than that. But so far - taking Wuhan as our baseline - unchecked this thing will spread very fast and kill lots of people. The only reason the onslaught was halted is because the Chinese took a bunch of draconian counter measures, the likes of which very few countries in the world will be able to copy.

> Qualifying a statement ending with ”means 2 million deaths in that single bracket alone.” with a qualifier that is false is what I would call fearmongering.

That's fine by me. But it isn't. As a whole it isn't and in the details it isn't either. We actually have precedent for this whole situation, it is the 1918 pandemic and the world apparently hasn't learned its lesson fully. Which may mean we are about to re-learn it the hard way. Maybe this time it will stick. But then - as now - there were plenty of people like you who were willfully - given the way this conversation is progressing I am assuming you are doing this on purpose - ignoring the cold hard facts. And that made the pandemic much worse than it had to be.

Large events were not called off and led to the disease spreading much further than it had to.

Absent an effective anti-dote to this virus and with an overwhelmed health care system (note the qualifiers!) we might as well be in 1918.

> No, it’s not an “implied assumption” it’s faulty epidemiology.

Not as far as I can see. People talk about hypotheticals all the time. You can't really come out like this against a pretty clear comment and at the same time make up stuff you rail against that never happened in the first place. Fix your own issues first.

> First, it is faulty to assume that everyone who is exposed will be infected.

Agreed, so let's divide the number by 4 and call it a day. That's the worst this could possibly get. Right? Or do you think that given a sample of '1' the 1918 flu might not be the best guideline for precision and that it might be better or worse? We don't actually know the answer to that.

> Second, it is faulty to apply the 1.4% case fatality rate of serious hospital infections to the entire US population.

That's true. But for all the same money we end up with a higher case fatality rate. So that may end up affecting the equation in a negative way.

But assuming 10% of the country becomes infected and 5% of those end up with symptoms serious enough to warrant ICU care there is a serious problem.

And that 10% could very well be low. So as far as I'm concerned you should start taking this a bit more serious instead of trying to shout down the discussion. Stay dispassionate and try to argue your case with actual numbers rather than nay-saying. That way you can contribute rather than just irritate. Think of it as an opportunity to educate, and you just might learn a thing or two yourself.