It's probably a bit late for this stuff from a containment perspective. But it would help reduce the r0.
Speaking personally, I have to decide by mid March if we should take our trip to Legoland in San Diego. Right now I'm leaning towards "no". And I don't imagine the outlook will be much better in just 2 weeks.
Maybe because it's not needed yet? We are talking about a few cases in a country of 300+ millions inhabitants. Even if we assume that there are many unreported cases, we can still assume that the risk is extremely low.
It's notoriously hard to assess probabilities of low events, so I would simply follow recommendations from experts, and so far my government hasn't emitted any specific restrictions (besides avoiding traveling to China and a few other places).
You are in a better position to assess your personal cost of WFH than the government is.
Because they're being told it is "contained in the U.S."
The worst case scenario right now is that some people might lose their grandparents a couple years early -- which is obviously incredibly sad, but also not something worth crashing the world economy over.
Any sources for that theory?
"The worst case scenario right now is that some people might lose their grandparents a couple years early"
in those numbers, but I can't find anything like this.
I do not have this opinion of my parents or any other immuno-compromised individual. Your worst-case-scenario is absolutely the worst-case scenario in many individual's minds.
If the greater good is not the extension of the life of those around us what exactly are we trying to do here?
There are many things worth crashing the world-economy over. Slavery was one. Climate change probably another.
Asking for a 90 day slow-down to prevent real-world deaths is probably one of the more concrete and predictable things we could do compared to most other altruistic choices facing us today.
I originally took your point to be that the current risks, although sad, are acceptable and we face greater peril from slowing down economic activity.
Although I see trade-offs to everything I see economic activity fundamentally as in service to the quality of life of a person and would rather take the sadness of losing greater economic gains to the sadness losing significantly more people.
There is always a balance to this and I could interpret what you said as having a different perspective on what the current risks are but without additional context, I took it as I did.
"Colleagues mourned the death of Peng Yinhua, a 29 Yo doctor who postponed his wedding to fight the COVID-19 outbreak"
"Liu Zhiming, the director of Wuhan Wuchang hospital, died at 51 Years old"
"Dr. Li Wenliang died at 33 Yo.
"Xia Sisi, 29, was a digestive physician working at Hospital in Wuhan. She died Sunday morning"
"Huang Wenjun, 42, deputy chief physician at the department of respiratory medicine at Xiaogan Central Hospital also died Sunday".