How to help fight Coronavirus

Today the people of San Francisco were ordered to shelter in place, New York was essentially shut down, and Italy saw more deaths in a day than the deadliest day in Wuhan.

Currently there are 181,580 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, and 7,138 deaths recorded.

For over a month I’ve been seeing people shame those who are taking precautions, and calling their actions “panic”. From what I’ve seen, almost all of those being accused of “feeding the fear propaganda” aren’t running around with their arms in the air screaming, they are simply advocating taking small steps to limit spread. They are encouraging people to be prepared in advance so that they aren’t out last minute with hordes of others stocking up for social distancing.

These actions were called “panic” a month ago, but now those who had shamed others are the ones taking these precautions. And they’re calling the next level of preparedness “panic”.
And if we get through this because enough people practice social distancing, these shamers will say “see, I told you so, it wasn’t that bad after all”.
But these people are freeriders. As a colleague put in, “Being the last person to finally pick up a bucket and start bailing out the boat isn't something to be proud of, nor is admonishing those who are doing the bailing and then patting yourself on the back when you step ashore well rested unlike the rest.”

The most effective way to fight this so that the rest of the world doesn’t end up like Italy is by avoiding other people as much as possible.

There are about 135000 ventilators in the US, and if we predict 55% of Americans catching COVID, 10 million of them will need ventilators, which could mean 3 million on a single day if all these cases are spread out across the rest of the year. Old people and young people are being hospitalized, and there aren’t enough beds for everyone.
http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2018_clade_x_exercise/pdfs/Clade-X-ventilator-availability-fact-sheet...