For the record, I don't like hypothetical questions, but this thought came up yesterday from another discussion.

So, from day zero, we obviously knew next to nothing about this virus and how to treat it or even what to look for. It makes a lot of sense to me that based on those issues we would have seen at least 500,000 deaths if we did absolutely nothing to mitigate it. Obviously, the death toll is debatable..could have been 1 Million or more, but for arguments sake, let's settle on the 500,000 number.

Fast forward to today. Doctors have learned an awful lot about this virus (still a lot more to go) and how it acts and offering different treatments. My hypothetical is...if on day zero we knew then what we know now but still did absolutely nothing, what percentage impact would that have on the death toll...would we have saved 10%, 20% or even more?

This could also be applied to opening the country. I've seen people say "if we open up everything right away, we could have hundreds of thousand and possible a million people die"...but is that true with everything we know today?

Extrapolate current hospitalization numbers over a much larger population segment, compare to hospital resources, determine what % of people die because there isn't adequate care available to hospital overrun.

Add that to existing death statistics. It's quickly worse than expected.

Granted, I'm of the opinion that sheltering should have been lifted for low-risk people already.