China isn’t the only country with suspect public reporting. Western officials have pointed to Iran, Russia, Indonesia and especially North Korea, which has not reported a single case of the disease, as probable under-counts. Others including Saudi Arabia and Egypt may also be playing down their numbers.

White House medical advisers now forecast that even if Americans follow unprecedented stay-at-home orders, some 100,000 to 240,000 people could die from the respiratory disease.

Under the plan, the government would guarantee up to 30 billion euros ($32.8 billion) for the commercial credit insurance industry, the sources said.

China has publicly reported 82,394 confirmed cases and 3,316 deaths as of Thursday, according to a rolling tracker by Johns Hopkins University.That compares to 216,722 cases and 5.137 deaths in the United States, the country with the world’s largest reported outbreak.

The U.N. health agency says 10% to 15% of people under 50 with the disease have moderate or severe infection.

“Severe cases of the disease have been seen in people in their teens or 20s with many requiring intensive care and some unfortunately passing away,” Kluge said.

Health care providers may prioritize patients without underlying conditions who are likeliest to make a full recovery, but there’s no national standard for triage. The question of withholding or withdrawing ventilators from the sickest patients is so charged that medical experts have encouraged providers to develop their own guidelines. Like the U.S. pandemic response itself, it’s largely a state-by-state and, to some extent, hospital-by-hospital patchwork.

While many classes of insurance, such as business interruption and event cancellation, exclude epidemics, D&O insurance usually provides cover and brokers said this could be a rare avenue for companies to recoup costs triggered by the pandemic.