If it’s mild, then why the drastic quarantines?
Because it is SUPER INFECTIOUS, 10 Times more contagious than the flu and still twice more fatal.
Because they didn’t actually know when it started spreading, probably last November and were unaware of it until it got into the population enough that severe cases started swamping the hospitals so they thought it was newer and more virulent than it actually was.
I was reading about the new South Korean patient that doesn’t seem to have any outside travel or travel connections. This could mean it’s actually been circulating for months mistaken for a cold or without symptoms and has now worked it’s way deep enough into the exposed populations to reach the mostly stay at homes of elderly or unwell populations where it becomes deadly serious.
Just like the flu, it is very dangerous to the old, the young and the chronically ill.
Before they had all this rapid genetic testing and coding technology, just about everything that had similar symptoms was called “the flu” and that was that. Some years were worse than others but nobody knew why.