Though you have to understand that the strategic response of the strict shutdown of society is based on (in the west in most countries already shown) not manifesting worse-case scenario-models, not based on any previous experience with respiratory infection pandemics.
There are two things wrong with this statement:
First of all, for any new virus whose characteristics are not fully understood, you can only work with models. You cannot use previous experience because there is none for a new virus. That should be patently obvious.
Maybe some people who suffer from anxiety or OCD, and therefore become panicked by all the news coverage of coronavirus. I can understand that. However, that is an issue of mental health; it is not because the model is wrong.
I don't feel any sense of panic about coronavirus, because I approach the subject with a rational mind, and I educate myself about how to protect family members and friends.
Secondly, the Imperial College London model of the pandemic, on which the UK and US governments are basing their response, is certainly not a worse-case scenario. I have seen papers which predict a far worse outcome. The Imperial model seems to be accurate so far, and what we want is a model which tells us what is going to happen, not a model which downplays the truth.
So it is not correct to call the Imperial model a worse-case scenario. It's a good model.
While Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Hongkong all have closer relations and experiences with China and such pandemics. Therefore just implemented their already proven less panicky meassures right from the start. With a far better outcome untill now. Than those countries just mimicking China's strict shut-down, once the media-driven panic was in full fledge.
Yes, Taiwan in particular has a whole government department dedicated to detecting the beginnings of possible pandemics anywhere in the world, and then coherently dealing with them. The Chinese outbreak thus came on Taiwan's radar very early, and triggered alarm buttons in that department, causing the whole Taiwanese government and the whole of Taiwanese society to start making plans and preparations very early. That's why they have no lockdown, yet only a handful of deaths.
Even as late as the beginning of March, medical experts in the UK were still saying that there is very low risk to the UK. They got that very wrong.
I think the West needs to try to emulate what has been done in these Asian countries. We should be asking industry to make masks on an emergency schedule, as Taiwan did. And while we wait for the masks, governments should do what the CDC recently did, which is to recommend people wear improvised masks or cloth coverings over the face when in public.
I can't believe the UK government is still following the garbage advice from the WHO, that face masks have no benefit in controlling pandemics. The WHO have given out some good pandemic advice, like the need to test as much as possible; but they may have got the mask issue badly wrong.
Bottom line,
@pamojja, is that the reason we are in lockdown in the West, at great risk to our economies, is because governments greatly underestimated the danger of coronavirus, and made no preparations. So when you try to convince us that coronavirus is no more dangerous than seasonal flu, remember that this kind of thinking put the West into this dire lockdown position in the first place.
This pandemic needs to be taken seriously, and we need to start using intelligent means to control it, as they did in Asia.