@Mark F apparently there are not riots in Italy, at least not yet. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-30/italy-risks-losing-grip-in-south-with-fears-of-looting-and-riots
If you understand the math of exponential growth on the “logistic curve” (see Paul’s post on that) and we don’t try to contain things, it will be much worse. Not a little worse. So far our efforts are not working in part because too many people don’t take it seriously, and we started two months late. What this could look like is https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus.html
The most recent 10X increase in the US took 10 days (Mar 18-28) per the John Hopkins site. We are still testing-limited so we have no idea how many walking Petri dishes we have. If we see 10X in another 10-14 days that would be 1.5 million cases and 25,000 dead. When will it stop? We have over 350 million people in the US so this could get really serious.
My wife is an MD in a local network of community health centers, the largest in our state. She’s at work today and was on call over the weekend. They do not have enough PPE so a group of us here are making face shields for them. That’s where my money and time are going instead of into my BFR (which I need).