I call BS. The total death toll in Italy, the hardest hit country, is currently 7500. I’d personally predict 20,000 - 40,000 deaths in the US. JMHO here, but I feel a bunch of folks are watching all this with lip-smacking relish. The higher the Doom Factor, the larger their smiles become. “See? We were right after all!”
I think the biggest issue is that say 40K die, I do think that the deaths will be a lot more condensed than what we see with the flu. The video of the doctor from one NYC area hospital seems legit. They have rented one refrigerated trailer to deal with the overflow of dead bodies as they ran out of room. Now that isn't five trailers, just one. So is this virus 1.5x worse than the flu? 3x?
One thing I'm seeing is more and more confirmations of people who test positive and this is after about two weeks of shutdown. A high school teacher is positive, but that school has been out of session for two weeks now. A person who worked at Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountain NP is positive. We now have a handful of nursing homes here in the Indy area with an outbreak, but most nursing homes have been locked down for two weeks. It seems the virus is just going to keep spreading.
I feel the best we can do is use this time of reduced social interaction to try and come up with a plan for additional hospital space and supplies. Take the next four to six weeks and try to produce as much as possible. Get it ready and then open back up slowly. Start with restaurants. Let them allow dine-in eating, maybe even if half capacity. Then bars and such, again, maybe half capacity. Do that for a month and see where we are at. If things aren't dire in the hospitals, then start going back to sporting events, etc.. We need to build the herd immunity.
We might have to go to place where the elders are going to have to wait this one out. They might have to limit trips to grand kid events. Might want to skip vacations in high density areas, cruising. If they want to go out to eat, I'd suggest road trips to popular small town eateries, less population likely less risk. At some point people are going to want to go back to as near normal as it was before.