With so many "prominent cases" already (people from big sports clubs in different countries , health minister, president, actors and so on) I think we have way more cases as we know about. But I guess that would be a good thing because the death rate could be much lower if we have already 10x as many cases as we know about.

I mean:

151 cases in Brazil and one is the president

~200 cases in Australia and one is Tom Hanks and his wife

800 in UK of whom one is the health minister, one the trainer of Arsenal London and a few play for big clubs

Doesn't sound plausible to me. 

Switzerland is closing all schools until at least April 4
Germany: most schools will be closed from Monday
United States: at least 7 states are closing schools: Ohio, Michigan, Oregon, Maryland, Kentucky and New Mexico
1,188 new case

It's the smart thing to do looking at how fast it got out of hand in Italy. With the long incubation period, initial mild flu like symptoms and average 1.2x daily growth rate of cases, by the time you detect the first cases (sick enough to go in) there could be many more already. Then a week later all those yet undetected cases have quadrupled already.

Say the first 2 cases detected are the tip of the iceberg, sick enough to go in after a week. Suppose there were already 10 cases at that time. That would mean 40 undetected cases and potentially another 160 a week later. (Added together close to 300 active cases) That's excluding more cases coming back home from other places.

What makes it dangerous is people with mild symptoms spreading the virus on without knowing it.

Dont quite agree with everything you said, but at least seems reasonable.

Let's just hope that these measures are enough to hold the virus and not kill the economy at the same time.

So a lot of people reyshed back to the US from Europe before the ban went into effect. What are the odds some of them came back with the virus?

Nah, just pissed at fools like you that can't think straight when the reality is that living your daily life has a bigger chance of killing you and your family than this disease has.

Fools are th4e ones that piss me off.

My personal opinion: Internet.

For better or for worse, the ease the information flows acts like a double edged sword.As you can see through the thread, people are easily scared, and that unfortunely has a gigantic impact on economy.So if the governments didn't implement these measures, they would be accussed of not caring about people enough, ending up causing a kind of damage that the virus wouldn't even come close to doing.In another words, people would panic more than they are now.

And you can already see the results:People floking to the markets to buy enough essencial products that could last months, investors pulling out their money and crashing stock markets through the world, people associating doing and not doing measures to political agenda(I think I have seen a thread about that yesterday), and so much more.

For better or for worse, the last big epidemic we had was the Swine Flu and while the death rate was smaller, its infection rate was much higher.And yet I don't remember the measures being taken to be this drastic.I might be misremembering though.

The counter test was negative.He is fine, thankfully.

Neither around you.

Stop being so egoistic and think about others when you try to tell them what they must do with their lifes.

You are the one who doesn't understand two simple things:

1. This disease will only kill so "few" people because of all these measurements which will obviously reduce the numbers by a huge margin. Here in Germany we have around 4000 traffic related deaths per year if I'm not wrong. If everyone would laugh so much about this disease as you do and politicians would also act like you do, we would have a lot more deaths in Germany after a year. So much about your "car accident" example from another post.

2. It doesn't help me to know that I won't die even when infected but also knowing that I will on average infect 2-3 more people who then will infect 2-3 more each to be responsible for 100+ infected people after some time. Because just for "I'm annoyed" there would be probably at least one death coming from my infection. 

But hey, it's up to you if you don't care that a 70 years old guy will die some weeks after you infected some other people it's up to you.