It's too late to spare the US from the conditions that we see today in Italy; the people who will be flooding our ICU's beyond capacity in two weeks have already been infected, they just don't know it yet.
People who think that the deaths per year from the flu are greater than this virus must've failed third-grade arithmetic, because this virus is obviously going to claim far more lives this year than any flu since the 1918 influenza epidemic.
The seasonal flu infects roughly 1 billion people per year and claims between 291,000 to 649,000 lives each year, giving:
- a case fatality rate less than .1%
- an infection prevalence of roughly 13%
The SARS-COV-2 virus on the other hand has:
- a case fatality rate probably in the 2.5% and 3.4% range (25 to 34 times higher than the flu)
- a projected infection prevalence of 50% to 70% of the global population
So we can expect this virus to infect 3.85 billion to 5.39 billion people and to claim 96,250,000 to 183,260,00 lives - more than 148-282 times worse than the most lethal year for a seasonal flu outbreak.
And that may be an overly optimistic projection because the developed world only has about 20% of the ventilators that we're going to need, so the case fatality rate could be higher than 5%.
I'd suggest that the US should ramp up ventilator production, but we exported our manufacturing sector to China and other eastern countries so we have almost no industrial sector left. Exporting our industry overseas was the greatest threat to our national security but our politicians didn't care because they're all bought, and now those chickens have come home to roost.