Schools are the biggest petry dishes in the country because this isn't affecting kids as much as older people, so the kids have no symptoms and just walk around spreading it to each other. That's why so many schools were very quick to close.
Here's the math issue with this virus:
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There is expected to be 100m exposures in the US. The mortality rate could be as low as 0.5% if we take drastic measures to contain it and slow the rate of spread or 3.5% if it is allowed to overwhelm the healthcare system (and the US has
fewer hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators per capita than Italy - let that sink in for a second...). Do the math on that and the difference between containment and not is the difference between 500k deaths and 3.5m. These drastic containment measures could save
3 million lives in the US, or close to 1% of the country's population.
Here is some CDC modeling:
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They model a worst case scenario closer to 200m exposures over the course of a year with 1.7m deaths and 21m hospitalizations. There are 925k
total hospital beds in the whole country, so if they all hit at once, that's over 20 patients for every single bed in the country if every patient in every hospital with other maladies is kicked out.
I'm a math person. It's easy to see that the math says slowing the spread of this and handling it over as long of a period of time as possible is absolutely critical for the health of the country.