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Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

"Flattening the Curve" is a deadly delusion

https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-dea...

"Flatten the curve" scenario requires r0 to between 1.0 and a small number above 1.0, like 1.1. In other words, it's not happening, you either contain the virus or let it explode.

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This argument doesn't negate the fact that a "flatter curve" means fewer people in hospitals (or turned away from hospitals) at a single time. The fact that we probably can't slow the virus enough to prevent overloading hospitals does NOT mean we should just throw up our hands. For instance it would be better for hospitals to be at double capacity than triple capacity.

It's also somewhat troublesome that for the 'flatten the curve' tactic the best case scenario is still infecting everyone...

No it isn't. The hope is that at some point a vaccine or lighter treatment becomes available. If that occurs before the end of the flat curve, that's a major change in outcome.

Most vaccines take 1.5 to 2 years to develop. By then most of the population will have been infected by it and will develop a natural immunity or resistance to it.

How much difference is there between the r0 value of 2 and that of 3? Maybe we can't flatten the curve to fit it under the threshold, but we can probably reduce the area above it?

Trevor Bedford had a tweet that indicated a 25% reduction in social contacts results in a 50% reduction in cases after 1 month:

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1237934525281259521

I think it's very likely that Wuhan or Italy style lockdowns will bring r0 under 1, based on the experience in Wuhan and Italy. That means the disease eventually dies out. Because it's endemic elsewhere in the world, it'll eventually be reintroduced and we get multiple waves, until eventually enough people have had it to generate herd immunity. But each wave starts back at the "containment" phase, with contact tracing and individual isolation, so combining lockdown + those measures + travel restrictions could probably buy enough time for a vaccine.

- For how long do you have to keep your containment measures up?

- Do you have to introduce new containment measures with every wave of reinfection?

- How many waves / months of total are required to achieve enough herd immunity while keeping the hospitals within capacity?

Presumably the answers to these are:

- Until a vaccine is developed.

- Yes

- Until a vaccine is developed.

Says some guy on medium that's not an epidemiologist. Are you one?

Flattening the curve is the only scenario a lot of countries can realistically do outside of a Wuhan style quarantine.

It's certainly effective propoganda to calm the Populus, from the government to the population and the population to itself. Hopefully leaders are sorting out more drastic measures in the meantime.

My attending went on the news to say that flattening the curve is our best bet at the moment. He's also considered to be one of the top physicians in the region. Y'all can sit here in a bubble, but the medical community has no hallucination that containment should have been done months ago and now it's past that.

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