Washington Post all in on coronavirus...

Predicting as many as 30 million hospitalized and 1.5 million dead in the U.S. alone!

A briefing offered to congressional staffers Tuesday by that body’s attending physician, Brian Monahan, indicated that it would go away once between 70 million and 150 million people had been infected with the virus.

Experiences in other countries indicate that 80 percent of those who fall ill with covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, will have “mild” symptoms — where “mild” includes such symptoms as “developing pneumonia.” The other 20 percent may need to be hospitalized. The World Health Organization estimates that, in the worst case, the disease has a mortality rate of 3.4 percent.

In other words, the spread of the virus across the United States could result in between 14 million and 30 million people having severe cases of the illness and between 700,000 and 1.5 million people dying.

So just for the sake of argument, let's say that the President was actually being told by the CDC that they believed that deaths from coronavirus would be into the hundreds of thousands and possibly cross over into the millions. What good would it do for the President to downplay that sort of honest assessment of the virus? He would literally look like a fool and might be personally blamed (even though he is playing pretty much zero part in the efforts to contain and treat the virus).

Moreover, the CDC is not giving not providing guidance right now to shut anything down. Here in Minnesota, our Schools are telling people that the CDC assures them that risks are low right now and that there is no need to shut schools down or shut down activities. Would the CDC actually be telling people that risks are low, if indeed they believed that upwards of half of Americans would contract this virus, that 10% of the country would have severe cases (that could require hospitalization), and hundreds of thousands would die?

Right now we have somewhere in the vicinity of 4600 deaths worldwide, with over 90% of those deaths coming from China, Italy, and Iran. Given our general population comparisons, we would assume at this point that China (with 1.3 billion people) would end up with between 2.5 and 6 million dead (if we were to assume 700,000-1,500,000 here). Given they were the first ones to be hit, had no chance to have anything in place, and are at least 6-8 weeks ahead of everyone else, we should be give ourselves some sort of preview of what we might be seeing in late April or early May.

Yet, China's deaths are about 0.15% of that estimate... and their numbers by almost all known accounts are going down (not up). The question becomes, who do you trust? The CDC or the Washington Post?