Bears repeating. The year and a half estimate already IS the accelerated timeframe where things are pushed ahead faster because of the current situation. Faster than that would be ethically and medically dubious. We don’t live in an episode of Star Trek.
That’s not a “traditional” schedule by any stretch. Please, please, please don’t spread bad information.
There are problems with your assumptions. First is the apron that if we let things run there course quickly, the economy will only be slightly affected. You are basing this on the idea that most people would be working. This is absolutely unfounded. When people start dropping like flies, they will flood the hospitals, morgues, makeshift hospitals, veterinary clinics, tents in parking lots - you name it. Then all the medical personnel - doctors, nurses, nursing assistants, medical students - will all start coming down with it. This is because gowns and masks and face shields and gloves would be burned through in days. Next, all your first responders will be hit: EMTs, firefighters, police. Because they have to deal with the infected.
The ones who aren’t in the ICU or hospital themselves would be in quarantine or self-isolation. So who would be carrying for all the sick and dying?
Then there’s the problem that anyone needing any kind of medical care, be it emergency surgery, elective procedures, or cancer treatments or infections or any doctor visit, would be shit out of luck. Because all medical facilities and personnel will already be swamped.
What happens to the economy when everyone has several family members die in rapid succession?
And it’s not just old people or those with underlying health conditionsthat are being severely hit. 40 percent of cases are between 18 and 40. Young people are ending up in the ICU in medically induced comas.
You think the stock market is going to be strong when CEOs and politicians start keeling over?
There’s no easy to get out of this without the economy taking a huge hit. The question is are we going to blindly let people die because there are more than the system can handle, or are we going to try to spread the effects so as many as possible have a fighting chance?
In addition to a possible vaccine, slowing things down allows for more time to find treatments (which can potentially be made available much faster, since the medical and ethical standards for sparsely tested treatments on people who are about to die are much lower than for a vaccine that you have to give en masse to healthy people), to build more hospitals and ventilators and masks, and most importantly: to get the number of cases low enough that ramped up testing and contact tracing can be used to keep them from exploding again.
The graphic that shows a big spike compared to a longer lower curve is misleading. The goal is not to still have ~40-70% of people get it over the course of 6 months rather than two. The goal is to drive current cases down to handfuls with as severe a lockdown as we can manage, then use careful relaxation of constraints along with better testing to keep cases low. Basically, do what S. Korea did, and what we could have done starting in January if there hadn’t been multiple fuckups.
This article, The Hammer and the Dance, describes the strategy well.
“traditional” is something for a disease that kills thousands. There will be millions of dead from this so I would expect the time frame for vaccines and treatments to be accelerated.
And just looking at the numbers we are seeing the doubling of deaths in the US every 3 days. That would mean a total of close to 2 million by the end of April. That is why we’re shutting everything down.
The appropriate way to deal with a contagious disease is to identify those who have it, and isolate them. At present, we cannot do this. Once tests finally, belatedly, become available, we can start easing the shutdown without killing millions of Americans. Until they are, though, the only two ways we can reduce the number of deaths is by shutdown, and increasing our capacity to treat.
2 thoughts for those thinking of the tradeoff maybe being not worth it:
-if you make a million a year, and assuming “savings” of not shutting down are distributed evenly (they wouldn’t) then your share of the savings is 0.000005 cents of every dollar saved.
-if we flatten the curve enough, and we have enough testing available to identify and isolate, you might not get this, ever.
There is a phase out of the stimulus payments for individuals based on their 2018 incomes. Why don’t they have a similar phaseout for corporations based on their 2018 income?
Here is an aspect to flattening the curve I have not heard discussed:
I am assuming that myself and nearly all of the people I work with at a large hospital will eventually contract the virus. I also assume that infections will spike sooner among hospital staff than the general population. There is no data to support these assumptions, but they seem reasonable. The data indicate that most of us will recover. When we recover, we will be immune to the virus, and available to care for new cases, without either contracting the virus themselves or carrying it to the uninfected. (biologically carrying, I mean…mechanical transmission is still something to worry about) From what I have read, the virus runs it’s course in 2-3 weeks, or so.
If half the hospital staff is out sick, then the workers that are left are touching twice as many patients.
If the curve is rather flat, then not only will existing medical infrastructure stand a better chance of being adequate to deal with the case load, but the infection rate of caregivers will be lower, and there is a much better chance that enough can recover in time to be useful in treating new cases. If the spike in cases coincides with the infection of caregivers, then that will further limit the availability of healthcare for the infected. It will be really bad if the situation is so dire that healthcare workers are needed to work while infected. In that case, anything you need to be hospitalized for means you are extremely likely to contract COVID-19 in the hospital. So don’t crash your car, or overdose on drugs or alcohol, or develop a heart condition, or have a stroke…because hospitals will likely not be there for you.
It seems to me that this is part of what happened (is happening) in Italy.
With a very tall bell, the people that may suffer most, and die most are health care workers. That causes a lack of care, and more importantly supply problems, and more deaths and more sick people that causes more sick health care workers that may die that makes the curve sharper. Rinse and Repeat.
Think of a battlefield medic. How many people can they save? Who is it gonna be? When your medics become overwhelmed and are getting shot at, it’s a pretty bad situation. Flatten the curve, and more can be saved.
In the Bay Area we shut things down early, before California as a whole did. It seems to be working.
Here is a page with data.. Santa Clara county, which was hardest hit, is seeing a decline in new cases and deaths. So is the Bay Area as a whole. It’s been about 2 weeks of lockdown which is when you’d expect to see an effect.
Cases can still spike, but at the moment it looks better. You can see the curve flattening in the graphs.