I keep hammering this home, but in my conversations with experts, the way to think about all this is *systemic risk* much more than individual risk to any given person in any given location. Here's an example.
Given auto-fatality rates, if you decided to drive around for a week without a seat belt (which you shouldn't do!), the odds that you *individually* would die in a crash would be quite elevated but still remain, numerically, quite low.
But from the standpoint of governments, when you've got millions of people on the road every day, that would add up to many, many unneccesary deaths! That's why we have seatbelt rules. It's why we have fire codes and a whole bunch of other safety regulations.
The same pertains here. Even if the outbreak gets quite bad, the odds that any particular individual is going to get very sick and die from coronavirus is going to be, in the grand scheme of things, relativley low..(Though quite elevated for seniors, and immuno-compromised) BUT!
When you multiply that across enormous populations, you're talking about a major public safety and public health problem! That's why we've seen other governments take fairly dramatic mitigation efforts, like closing schools etc.
Not only that, unlike car crashes, the problem here is contagion, and the exponential curve of transmission. So from a public safety perspective, you need to take fairly dramatic steps *early* to slow that curve and reduce the scope of the problem later.
Even when those steps are taken (like UW closing classes) the *individual* risk is going to remain low, so you shouldn't panic! Or be losing sleep! But policy makers should be losing sleep.
