This comic shows how basically dumb science is. Why would you answer “we don’t know” when the question was clearly “so things will be bad (unless someone acts)?” and the answer is YES.
Here’s the prime minister of my country giving a press conference telling everybody not to shake hands anymore… except that there’s a plot twist at the end
Sooo… Should I go to a go tournament in 1.5 weeks?
Are you trying to pry out how much you are liked in here?.. 
FWIW, I would… but I cannot make risk assessments for your particular circumstances
in our country they just don’t test people with pneumonia, no matter how hard patients are asking to. Only foreigners with symptoms are tested and those who were near them. If you never was near foreigner, you never will be tested. So 20 is much less than reality.
All schools are closed here for 2 weeks (or until further notice). My company we are working from home, other companies, too, and paid leave (EDIT: not sure if fully paid, but at least in part covered) for 2 weeks to parents, so they can have the kids at home. Concerning, but not bad news per se.
What irks me: most teachers/ professors are on booking. com getting cheap tickets to Europe for these 2 weeks, people who supposedly work from home are at cafes or at the supermarket and generally mingling, parents who supposedly keep their kids at home send them to extracurricular activities to “get some peace at home” or they all go out to playgrounds (the indoors kind).
EDIT: Update on the church issue: government still * crickets *, some church officials said outright that holy water treats coronavirus and nobody dares to declare otherwise in the media. I’m livid.
In parallel world, where everyone who don’t work with material objects, work in internet from home only. Epidemic would be much less probable and economic impact if it happens would me minimal.
Part of my job is meetings with clients and authorities. Phone/ video calls are just not the same, human nature being how it is. Also, audits and other stuff need to be done in person. So, I don’t think it’s only working with materials.
And work/ commuting is not the only part, schools and any kind of socializing/ errands/ travel still count. Working from home isn’t home confinement, so I don’t think it would have such a big impact to claim that it would be minimal.
Here’s an interesting thought: viruses don’t really care about who you are and what you’re doing, so considering its deadliness for the older generation and the fact that many world leaders are above 60 and have a job that requires meeting a lot of people, statistically this must mean we will lose some of them to the virus…
If we only look at the American situation, Donald Trump (73), Mike Pence (60), Bernie Sanders (78) and Joe Biden (77) are all in the risk category.
Then we have Queen Elizabeth (93) and her son Prince Charles (71, British commonwealth), Vladimir Putin (67, Russia), Xi Jinping (66, China), Jair Bolsonaro (64, Brazil), Angela Merkel (65, Germany), Narendra Modi (69, India), Ali Khamenei (80, Iran), Benjamin Netanyahu (70, Israel), Abe Shinzo (65, Japan) and Recep Tayyip Erdogan (66, Turkey)
We’re bound to at least lose one or two of them.
But that’s the only good thing about this pandemic… 
For most of them I agree
Seriously, yesterday I was thinking “What if Trump just dies unexpectedly from Covid-19?”, but later I thought, it’s probably better if he doesn’t die too soon, so that everyone realizes how much he f***s this emergency up, and his voters get a chance to learn something.
(Sorry… am I being too mean? Am I allowed to write something like this here? 
)
I dislike a handful of them, but I don’t like this comment, sorry. Especially the path that it leads down to. (Sidenote: Leaders can be despicable, but also stabilize nations.)
Ministers of countries are already starting to fall ill, btw.
North Korea is a very stable nation, I don’t think that stability is a good measure of whether the leader is doing a good job…
I didn’t say they are doing a good job. But killing them/ having them die is not generally accepted as the best solution.
I’m not saying that killing them is a good solution either. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t mourn for some of them.
And my point was not to have this discussion about whether it’s good or bad if a world leader passes away, rather I wanted to say that coronavirus is most likely going to have a political effect on a few countries as well.
I wouldn’t mourn our own prime minister. But I don’t think you get how worrying it is for us to have the leader of our neighbor country die out of the blue (whom if I say I don’t like it’s an understatement.). If Trump dies (who falls in the same category), do you expect it to just cause a mild inconvenience?
This is not some philosophical discussion, the ramifications are very real, very complex and not to be taken lightly. Just nonchalantly stating that some countries may face chaos is not a good look.
EDIT: I don’t like their leader, I like the country just fine.
I expect it to stir things up, and in some cases the only way to improvement is through stirring things up.
Look at the French revolution, and related revolts in Europe: I’m quite glad that there has been a very unstable period so that we now have a government instead of an absolute monarchy.