Further excerpts from the Times article. If I could find a non paywall version of this, I'd post it, but many may be able to read the piece anyway...
@JazzyFresh, if you wish to dispute any of this, you need to do so with the doctors involved in the projections described, not with me. I will not jump through hoops for you. So, when you have the balls to demand, to paraphrase you: "yes or no? Answer", don't hold your breath....
(When asked to predict how many cases the country will face, Fauci said that will depend largely on the government’s response.
“I can’t get you a realistic number until we put into the factor of how we respond,” he said. “If we are complacent and don’t do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up to many, many millions.”:
https://nypost.com/2020/03/11/coron...worse-warns-white-house-expert-anthony-fauci/)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-estimate.html
Even severe flu seasons stress the nation’s hospitals to the point of setting up tents in parking lots and keeping people for days in emergency rooms. Coronavirus is likely to cause five to 10 times that burden of disease, said Dr. James Lawler, an infectious diseases specialist and public health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Hospitals “need to start working now,” he said, “to get prepared to take care of a heck of a lot of people.
Dr. Lawler recently presented his own “best guess” projections to American hospital and health system executives at a private webinar convened by the American Hospital Association. He estimated that some 96 million people in the U.S. would be infected. Five out of every hundred would need hospitalization, which would mean close to five million hospital admissions, nearly two million of those patients requiring intensive care and about half of those needing the support of ventilators.
Dr. Lawler’s calculations suggested 480,000 deaths, which he said was conservative. By contrast, about
20,000 to 50,000 people have died from flu-related illnesses this season, according to the C.D.C. Unlike with seasonal influenza, the entire population is thought to be susceptible to the new coronavirus.....
.......The most lethal pandemic to hit the United States was the 1918 Spanish flu, which was responsible for about 675,000 American deaths, according to
estimates cited by the C.D.C.
The Institute for Disease Modeling
calculated that the new coronavirus is roughly equally transmissible as the 1918 flu, and just slightly less clinically severe, and it is higher in both transmissibility and severity compared with all other flu viruses in the past century.