The national emergency is for two reasons:
(1) frees up a lot of emergency funding
(2) Corps of Engineers and Public Health Service assistance in getting new hospitals running.
As far as the models, better safe than sorry. Until we have better testing up and running and know more, let’s try to reduce the spread of this thing. Remember, if it infects 3 people per week from one person on average and you can get that number down to 2, in 5 weeks, you’ll have 32 cases vs 243. If you can get the number below 1, the epidemic will burn out naturally.