Their initial response was to do largely what the USA is doing now. Hide the impacts, pretend everything is ok. They only reversed course when their hospitals

Their initial response was to do largely what the USA is doing now. Hide the impacts, pretend everything is ok. They only reversed course when their hospitals became so overloaded that they had to do something. People seem fixated on this idea that a 1-2% death rate is going to be mean that 1-2% are going to die, but this ignores hospitals being overloaded. From: http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/02/study-72000-covid-19-patients-finds-23-death-rate http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/02/study-720... A total of 81% of cases in the JAMA study were classified as mild, meaning they did not result in pneumonia or resulted in only mild pneumonia. Fourteen percent of cases were severe (marked by difficulty breathing), and 5% were critical (respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction or failure). So from this study, 19% of the cases were severe and required hospitalization. There are 320 million people in the us, lets say 30% get it at once. That's 320m * .3 * .19 = 18 million people. Of course, some of that 18 million will be taken care of by hospitals, but that would account for only a tiny fraction, there are only about 91k ICU hospital beds in the US From: http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/cbn/2020/cbnreport-02272020.html http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/cbn/2020/cbnreport-02... 46,500 medical ICU beds in the United States and perhaps an equal number of other ICU beds that could be used in a crisis.