This reminds me of the Y2K hysteria, for those of you who remember.

Sell all your stocks! Buy gold and bury it. Don't go out of the house! Buy up all the water, peanut butter and toilet paper! The world is going to end!

Its the bloody flu folks, why don't you just calm down.

Our fear is bringing down a perfectly good economy. STUPID!!!!

On the bright side, there is hardly any traffic, smog, and no lines for movies and good restaurants.

@ Tina

Yes. But with a much higher death rate. ~61,000 flu deaths per year out of over 40 million reported cases per year: 0.1525% mortality. 4,584 covid-19 deaths out of 124,578 reported cases: 3.68% mortality.

With a longer incubation period with who knows how many Typhoid Marys spreading it without actually being sick themselves.

If we all took adequate flu precautions in the first place, I suppose this wouldn't be such a big deal. But we )most people) don't.

I know I have had disagreements with MV Renter from time to time.

But I have to agree with MV Renter in this one.

Unfortunately, the only thing we can do is ride this virus out.

Either get a vaccine real fast so the people will not need to be sick to get protection.

OR wait until all people globally are exposed and either develop an immunity successfully, or even with medical intervention, they will die.

The only other alternative is isolation of all people.

That is not only even more dangerous because there are circumstances that could kill you if you’re alone, or by simple lack of human contact, some may actually hurt themselves (even kill themselves). But the key thing is isolation WILL kill the economy because it cannot work under that situation.

I hope the world will be able to ride this out with the minimum loss of life.

But there is no shortcutting this.

@ Tina....I kinda see the point you're trying to make, how we prepared for something that never happened. But this IS happening. It's a pandemic. And recent experts have said this isn't a "blizzard", that we are going to experience a "winter". Several months before the "curve" starts. Science and math don't lie, watch a video about the various formulas for "exponential growth and epidemics". This isn't a "suck it up" moment. We ALL need to be smart about this and help shorten the equation.