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Comment by quartzite | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. All this talk of "flattening the curve" is counterproductive if the curve remains flattened right at capacity for an extended period of time, which is what these measures will cause, rather than spiking for a short period.

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No one in this country is mentally ready for hospitals to just not be available for an unknown amount of time. IMHO this would cause complete societal breakdown. It's one of our basic needs like food and shelter.

One wonders why they don't call it elongating the curve.

Yeah, because a quick spike wouldn't have any outside effects at all.

You sound as if you're ok with millions of people dying miserably.

You think a long period of decreased economy is bad, the spike might cause outright panics and armed unrest.

We can print dollars, we can't resurrect the dead.

Why not make the death fast? The argument is for euthanasia not a poor life to slowly die.

It's not "death fast", it's: 1) way more deaths and a complete congestion of medical services vs. 2) less deaths, manageable medical service and a period of painful stagnation for the economy.

If you get critically sick or injured (not COVID19 related) and hospitals are overflowing, you will suffer when no one can see you because of COVID19 cases.

And the problem is that during an extended period of curve reduction there will still be people pushed out of medical care due to surging cases (but not spiking!). The total area between the number of patients and hospital capacity curves may be similar in both cases.

This also assumes an invariant capacity. Extended period gives us the opportunity increase that capacity through means including getting folks trained as hospital techs (4 week training) and having local teams sew & build our filters and masks.

Essentially given a will, we could transition part of our economy to a war footing (against the virus). Do we have the will?

Or do we capitulate and decimate the population?

Why not move to a system where those most likely to live with minimal resource consumption move up? You’d probably need a multiplier for those that are useful to society but need more resources

That sounds an awful lot like a romanticized perfect democracy, which cannot exist outside of fiction, or a social credit system. There's an ongoing study on the effectiveness of a social credit system. It's happening in China. Go test it out and report back.

Can you print economic output though? Printing dollars only works when there are things to buy and sell. More money and less things to use it on only makes the money less useful (inflation). Usually the economy can absorb that extra supply pretty well to the point of being insignificant, but that doesn't work when you just stop said economy.

Also, how do you think we will be able to support and help those more vulnerable if we don't have any economic output? Will printing money make supplies appear from nowhere?

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