"A forecast just produced by University of Nebraska Medical Center professor James Lawler on behalf of the American Hospital Association, for example, put the potential death toll in the hundreds of thousands if efforts to mitigate the epidemic failed.

Another forecast, developed by former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden at the nonprofit organization Resolve to Save Lives, found that deaths in the U.S. could range widely, depending on what percentage of the population gets infected and how lethal the disease proves to be. Frieden, who oversaw the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the 2014 Ebola epidemic and the 2016 Zika epidemic, says in a worst-case scenario, but one that is not implausible, half the U.S. population would get infected and more than one million people would die.

His team put together a simple table that looks at various scenarios using case fatality ratios ranging from .1, similar to seasonal flu, to .5, a moderately severe pandemic, and 1.0, a severe one. The infection rate ranged from 0.1 percent of the population to 50 percent. That put the range of deaths from 327 (best case) to 1,635,000 (worst case).
U.S. officials have said they are working with 50 different academic modeling groups around the country. But so far, no projections of the outbreak’s trajectory have been publicly released by the CDC or the White House coronavirus task force. Still, Frieden said, “anyone who says that they know where this is going with confidence doesn’t know enough about it,” he said."

Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, about 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

Currently, because the United States has been extremely sluggish in testing patients for the coronavirus, the official tally today likely represents a fraction of the real caseload. But even if we take this number at face value, it suggests that we should prepare to have up to 10 times as many cases a week from today, and up to 100 times as many cases two weeks from today.

The second fact is that this disease is deadlier than the flu, to which the honestly ill-informed and the wantonly irresponsible insist on comparing it. Early guesstimates, made before data were widely available, suggested that the fatality rate for the coronavirus might wind up being about 1 percent. If that guess proves true, the coronavirus is 10 times as deadly as the flu.
If it as the WHO states, 3.4%, it is greater than 30 times.