Am I reading this right? That taking preventive measures will prolong the outbreak????

[LAS14]

There is a chart in this link which suggests that roughly the same number of people will get COVID-19 whether we take preventive measures or not. What will change is how long the outbreak lasts and whether or not the healthcare system is over run.

If the system is overrun, thousands will die needlessly because of lack of respirators, etc. So if we were really, really well prepared for the inevitable respiratory virus that will cause epidemics, we'd have millions of respirators, just waiting in the wings. And other necessry stuff, like enough nurses (??). And then we could just let people go about their business and the crisis would be over more quickly.

If the health care system wouldn't be overrun, we could adopt the measles approach of my child hood. Go get it now.

Again, am I reading this right?


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D4V36_nMqQNh1tusNVqozNjPw6N1457pajuFdPjCSCo/preview

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Yes. And prolonging it can mean more people get the care they need, rather than overloading

the system. It all depends on what public health's goal is, of course.

[Blue_true]

11. "Public Health Goal" with Trump in charge? That guy can't concentrate for 15 minutes,

and he has installed asslickers everywhere. Competence is not something that he looks for in staff people, it's all about making him look wise and important.

[unblock]

2. Well, yeah. The idea is that something like 70% of the world will get it eventually

So the idea is to spread out the infections over time so the number of people needing hospitalization at any one time doesn't overrun the capacity of the people and equipment to treat them.

Basically, the "preventive" measures are really more like "delaying" measures.

If you're careful and lucky, maybe you delay it long enough for a vaccine to arrive.

[DrToast]

3. Yes, you want it to last long enough to treat everyone

[zipplewrath]

4. We may already be past the point

It is hard to know because there is so little testing going on, but we may be past the point of being able to prevent the spread at all. Even the rate of spread may be hard to stop at this point.

[Pobeka]

6. Even if we have 4000 cases now in the USA, we can reduce the peak a lot!

Simplistic modeling, I know, but we are still at the front end of this thing. If right now we could reduce our contacts by 33% we can reduce the peak by nearly half.

Even if we could only reduce the peack by 10%, that's a lot of lives to save.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. +1. Slowing the virus is a big win in so many ways. . . nt

[Pobeka]

5. YES!! and that is a good thing!!!

Assuming you can't change the total number of cases, what you can do is "flatten" the curve, which means the medical system is not overloaded as much, which means more people get the care they need when they get sick, which mean less people die or have serious complications in the long run.

I've just started looking at the modeling of this, and it appears that if each of us was to reduce the number of human to human interactions we have each day by just 1/3rd, it could reduce the size of the peak by 1/2. That's HUGE. It's like compound interest in a way, but reversed, if that makes sense.

[Strelnikov_]

8. Flatten the curve

The sooner we lock the country down the better. Even if it is porous, it will help.

[Pobeka]

10. Can you explain the blue line?

I assume the area under each of the red, green and blue lines are equal. Green looks like just social distancing. Blue is ?

[Strelnikov_]

12. Per the link below

"A baseline simulation with case isolation only (red); a simulation with social distancing in place throughout the epidemic, flattening the curve (green), and a simulation with more effective social distancing in place for a limited period only, typically followed by a resurgent epidemic when social distancing is halted (blue). These are not quantitative predictions but robust qualitative illustrations for a range of model choices."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30567-5/fulltext

A lot of smart people here, and we do have some smart people, were talking about this concept days ago.

We need to be shouting it from the rooftops.

[Pobeka]

13. " We need to be shouting it from the rooftops."

Indeed!

Thanks for the link.

[Ms. Toad]

9. Yes - and doing so will save lives.

We do not have the medical equipment (respirators, for example) or beds to save everyone who will get sick simultaneously if the growth rate continues.

[Quixote1818]

14. They don't want to overwhelm the hospitals all at once like in Italy and China

That can be a catastrophe.