What do you do?
China was able to set up separate, massive quarantine/hospital areas, away from other hospitals and populated areas. Can we do that here?
In LA, if they end up with 100,000 cases, can we tell the LA Lakers "Hey, season's over, we're converting the stadium into a quarantine hospital until this passes". This is what CDC is concerned about - that we cannot overrun our existing hospitals with highly infectious patients, but we have to treat them somewhere.
Where? Is anyone at the head of the federal government going to help come up with options in populated areas?
We certainly aren't there yet; Italy is rapidly going in that direction with +450 cases in just one week. And many of these people seem to take 2 weeks or more to recover. We ain't got the hospital beds or quarantine areas to cover that. UNLESS we start planning for it. And it does not appear anyone is making any semblance of a contingency plan.
AND....the other thing to consider is that in China, people have been exposed to versions of these coronaviruses, likely from the same animals, for decades. What if their immune systems are more primed for recognizing them, and we Westerners are not? What if this ends up like smallpox brought to Native Americans, that wiped them out in far greater numbers.
That may not be likely, but it most certainly is possible.
No way the US can have a response like that of China, that’s just in our political nature. Right now the plan would be for for home isolation. I’m sure there are more as well.
We also have Coronavirus here as well, see a couple each week.