Death rate is what has caused several in the US and the world to go on a full on shut down. When you have something that supposedly spreads like wildfire and supposedly kills at a 1-2% clip which is 10%-20% of the flu you're going to cause widespread panic especially with a particularly hard flu season this year.
If the virus is truly as contagious as what the epidemiologists and scientists are saying you are going to have far more than 68,000 positive cases in 3 weeks. Let's take this year's flu for example: There have been 19 million flu cases in the US from 2019-Jan 2020 which equates to 337,278 cases per week. Over a 3 week time span we have only 69,219 corona virus cases. In a 3 week span we have see on average 1,011,834 flu cases.
If the coronavirus were as equally contagious as the flu and in theory we haven't been able to adequately test the 1,011,834 that is infected that would have the death rate being 1,054/1,011,834 = 0.1% which is the exact same death rate of the flu. If this virus is any more contagious than the flu and spreads at even a fraction faster it is then less than as deadly as the common flu.
So if we work under the assumption that this thing spreads more rapidly than the common flu than the death rate is nothing that warrants a full shut down as what's been happening. The only justification to keep the masses at home the is the premise that this thing is far more deadly than the flu. In order to say that you then have to back off on how contagious it is. And if it's not as contagious why keep people at home?
Both assumptions about the virus are working directly against one another.