The news is garbage for panicky babies but you already knew that.
Here is some genuinely useful data. The Diamond Princess effectively offers us Petri dish conditions with which we can examine Corona.
“But the Diamond Princess cruise ship offers an interesting insight. It had nearly 4,000 people on board—many of them in risk groups. (Somebody who used to perform aboard cruise ships quipped that passengers are mostly “the newlywed and the nearly dead” ;)) You’d expect these packed together on a ship in quarantine to be all infecting each others. And yet… 4,061 passengers and crew were examined, on board what effectively became an unintentional virus incubator. Only 712 contracted the virus (about 17.5%), of which 334 asymptomatic (8.2% of the total), leaving 378 (9.3% of the total) ill. Only 7 people died (1.85% of those ill, or 0.17% of all passengers and crew examined), all of them age 70 or older. (Remember, the passenger population is skewed toward the elderly.)”
There is additional data from South Korea at the link.
The Dark Herald 
I’ve been wondering why people have not been focusing more on the Diamond Princess. Perhaps the conclusions to be drawn from it are not scary enough.
It’ll be interesting to see if the Asian nations that have had a successful suppression strategy experience second waves as they go back to normal.
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It does seem to be a perfect data set to determine how dangerous the disease is.
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Have to disagree–the population of the cruise ship were obviously people with IQs on the right side of the bell curve (e.g. “hand washers”), and with access to primo medical care for those who needed medical attention. I’ve been interested in the delta of change on the diagnosed curve for various nations. If that’s rising exponentially, this whole thing goes tits up pretty quick in that area. Tons of media people focused on the low death rate, but we haven’t reached capacity for ICU beds yet. Once/if we do, this thing could jump to black plague levels. Or they invent a vaccine tomorrow. Frustrated that everyone on the tv/radio is binary–you should either panic, or poo-poo the whole thing. Panic-READY is where I think we should be.
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