It is unclear if the death rate from Coronavirus is 0.2% or 2%, or even less than 0.2% . The problem is three fold: (1) you don’t have all the cases identified in the denominator because they are mild or lack test kids, (2) you don’t have all the misclassified pneumonia deaths identified in the numerator, and (3) more than half of folks who have gotten the virus haven’t recovered yet, and deaths trail new cases by ~3 weeks.
Regardless of the relative death rate, the problem is that international cases (in the website linked above) are currently growing exponentially over past two weeks, unconstrained by the mass shelter-in-place and military-enforced Wuhan quarantine that slowed China’s numbers.
International case numbers (and deaths) are doubling every 4 days and increasing 10x every 2 weeks. At that rate a significant percentage of the planet is infected by late May.
Serious cases are ~5x the number of deaths. Let’s say the numbers are inflated and the death rate is actually 0.2% rather than 2%, which would mean 1% serious cases. If 50% of the US becomes infected at roughly the same time, with 1% serious, that’s 330 million * 50% * 1% = 1.6 million. The USA has less that a million, mostly occupied, mostly not quarantine-ready, hospital beds.
An article making this point for UK:
https://medium.com/@amwren/forget-about-the-death-rate-this-is-why-you-should-be-worried-about-the-coronavirus-890fbf9c4de6
If we don’t slow this down, and spread out the serious cases, we will lose a lot of loved ones across all ages. Close contact, cross-region, mass participation events will not slow things down.