More common is the daily ritual of getting in line at the crack of dawn, hoping to get medical care and getting at best some IV fluids then kicked out each evening because you don't officially have the virus. Of course if you ask, there's no tests available.
There's numerous videos of people passing out in public, which could be just a non-representative sample. What makes it scary to me, is that everyone around just looks and seems to think it's normal/expected.
But if you look at twitter, WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, Aljazeera, Lancet, and the BBC you start to see a picture not really consistent with "only" 30k people sick.
After all CDC reported on a fairly normal flu season in 2018-2019 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6824a3.htm?s_cid=mm...), not as bad as the previous year. 43M sick, 647,000 hospitalized, 61,200 dead. The world didn't notice, no factory closing, no global supply chains halted, no stumbling economies, no rush to build hospitals, no halt of airlines, and no $174B injected (like last Monday) into the economy to stabilize things.
Somehow under 30k infected and 565 dead is a big deal? Should we ignore every crematorium in Wuhan running 24x7?
China is keeping a pretty impressive lid on it, but the cracks are starting to showing. The official numbers are a joke.
If it was spreading and killing as fast as you are thinking we would be reading a lot more about it from other countries. As much as chinese media is not to be trusted the western media and people are also not to be trusted to talk about china as they are biased the other way.
Spreading fast, sure. Killing fast, no. That's in many ways the issue - If this thing spreads strongly and asymptomatically, and eventually develops into conditions with high mortality, that's a really bad situation to be in.
Folks keeling over before they can spread it is one thing, but appearing fine until long after spreading it to other people means it's spread isn't known until the symptoms start showing up all over the show.
Not sure I can agree that western media is biased towards not hyping these kinds of events.
“mortality rate when you have access to a mechanical ventilator”
vs
“mortality rate when you have access to IV fluids and a floor to sit on”.