Checking predictions from 17 days ago

Fox News reported on a March 31 White House briefing:

The extension of the social distancing guidelines comes after Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and other public health officials on the White House coronavirus task force ominously warned that even if the U.S. were to continue to do what it was doing -- keeping the economy closed and most Americans in their homes -- the coronavirus could still leave 100,000 to 240,000 people in the United States dead and millions infected.

Without any measures in place to mitigate the contagion's spread, those projections jump to between 1.5 and 2.2 million deaths from COVID-19.

So we have been locked down for the last 17 days in order to reduce American deaths from 2 million to 200 thousand.

I don't believe it. I think that without any lockdown, the death total would be less than 100k. And I don't think the lockdown will have much long-term reduction in Wuhan virus deaths. (It might decrease deaths from traffic accidents, and increase deaths from suicide and economic damage.)

Experts are still predicting doomsday, as this MIT model suggests that we need to be locked down for another year.

As I see it, most people are going to be exposed to this virus eventually, no matter what is done, and it will be just another common cold to the vast majority of them.