An interesting counterintuitive poll?

Poll: As Coronavirus Spreads, Fewer Americans See Pandemic As A Real Threat

Just about 56% of Americans consider the coronavirus a “real threat,” representing a drop of 10 percentage points from last month. At the same time, a growing number of Americans think the coronavirus is being “blown out of proportion.”

“Since the pandemic has taken root and grown in the United States, Democrats and Republicans are now poles apart,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute of Public Opinion. “The consequences of these differing perspectives are shaping how people are responding to calls for action.”

There is also a generational gap as well as quite obviously a geography gap with people responding differently based both on their age and where they live. Talk to a millennial out here in Seattle and they believe we are facing the black plague. Talk to a boomer in the MSP airport and they believe it's nothing to worry about.

All that being said, I find it a little counterintuitive that the number of people that see it as a real threat is going down at the same time the country is setting up more and more restrictions and reactions to the virus itself.

The only thing that provides possible clarity (and this is something that sort of bugs me) is the constant moving of the goalposts. Just a  couple of weeks or so ago, people were demanding that would be seeing exponential growth as soon as this week. Then I heard that the real growth would not be for two or three more weeks, but another source states that we are fifteen weeks (or four months) away from the "peak" of the virus. People are going to have a hard time staying this vigilant (and this scared) for the next 15 weeks... if we are still waiting at that point for it to explode.

So I suspect that there is going to continue to be some drop in this number if the amount of deaths are still following a fairly linear path coming into April.  On the flip side, as testing ramps up, the number of reported cases will also ramp up (even if the deaths lag behind that curve).

Working backwards, the best guesstimates are putting the mortality rate at between a half percent and one percent. If you add up our deaths and critical patients right now, and work backwards it suggests that our real number of cases are no less than somewhere between ten and twenty five thousand. We just haven't detected all of them yet.