Name:   CRD - Subject:   Yes Mr H, Many on this forum are HIGHLEY educated Date:   3/17/2020 9:25:10 PM

Archie, for you the layman, how one labels an event becomes almost an obsession.  It dictates your response and contributes mightily to your baseline level of anxiety.  For those in healthcare, we should responsibly rely on data that dictate our recommended responses regardless of how the layman describes the event.   The most valuable piece of information for answering questions regarding  future infectivity for example,  which assists departments of public health in recommending certain precautionary behavior is not how you so non chalantly extrapolated data, but would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have.  Therefore, your doomsday predictions, which predicate your labeling of this "crisis" makes sense to you,  It does not to me because we simply don't have data to support your assumption.  This is still an infectious disease that warrants all of us working together to contain it in a data driven manner that is free from panic and blame.