Cal88 said:
Yes Xultaif, I've got good friends in Northern Italy and in the Far East, so I know that the pandemic is real, and given the contagious nature of the virus and global mobility today, it's only a matter of time until America is hit with the same intensity as in Korea or Italy. This might be a once in a lifetime pandemic event, we've never gone through it before, so people will tend to downplay its potential gravity until it hits home.
Do you live in Europe or something? How is China the Far East, especially for those of us in California? Yes, I understand that's how it was referred for centuries by the Europeans, but given (1) we know the Earth is round and (2) we (mostly) live in California, shouldn't China be considered the Near West?
It's a pet peeve of mine because referring to China as being in the East threw off my learning the cardinal directions (at least in English). I mean, in California, China's to our west and we're much closer to China than we are to England. So why the heck do people refer to it as the East (or worse, the Far East)? To this day, it still takes me a second or two to figure out if I mean to say East or West, thanks to the inane Eurocentrism employed by generations past.
But I digress, at this point no one knows just how "bad" Covid-19 really is (let alone, will be). China hasn't been transparent with its reporting on the disease. Additionally, the efforts it took to minimize the spread of Covid-19 smacked of closing the barn doors after the horses escaped. Until the actual transmission rate and fatality rate are really known, we won't know if this is a once-in-a-century-pandemic virus or if it's on par with the flu or SARS/MERS.
This isn't to say we shouldn't take steps to prepare for and prevent its spread in the U.S. Rather, we shouldn't be panicking about it (let alone making spurious claims about the estimated death toll in the U.S. absent any data driven analysis).