I don't know if it's a world wide crisis yet but it's trending that way. Just look at the explosion of non-China cases over the past 3 weeks. On Feb 18 there were 1,000 cases outside of Mainland China. Today there are 21,000. That's not media hype or politics or whatever, that's just facts. Yes the vast majority of people who contract the virus will have mild symptoms and even of those that don't only a fraction of those will die. But given how this thing is spreading that's still a lot of deaths not to mention the impact on the world economy both from precautions and from people being out sick.

I keep seeing people say it's "just like the flu" but that's misleading. First off, there's a vaccine for the flu. That helps keep the number of cases and deaths down. There's no vaccine for this virus. Second, it appears that this virus is both more contagious and deadlier than the flu. That doesn't mean it's the plague or ebola because the flu is not very lethal in this country. I think I saw around 50,000 people die from it here every year. So if this virus is twice as contagious or twice as lethal (or both) then you're talking about 100,000 deaths. While that's not a staggering amount considering the total population, that's still 100,000 people dead.