It's not a "worse case scenario", it's successful containment through quite strict quarantine measures. Since neither USA nor Italy are taking measures remotely comparable to what Hubei or Henan did when they had a similar amount of spread, we should expect these countries to have a much larger spread than Hubei did, it's really not reasonable to assume that they would be able to limit this to "around 0.1% of their population were diagnosed with covid" - it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that.
The population density of Hubei is over 9x that of the United States, the quality of care is better in the United States, and there was basically no action taken for the first 2 months of the outbreak.
"it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that."
Will there ever be apologies for spreading mass hysteria?
Will there ever be apologies for downplaying justified warnings and saying "it's just the flu" with dire consequences?
E.g. in a recent turnabout Vice President Mike Pence said today that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.
