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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

I saw the videos from Wuhan hospitals 2 months ago and it was clear that the severity of this was off the charts. You can pretty much scale up the situation from a single hospital, because it tells you that it's impacting locally more than the hospital can respond.

You don't need "evidence" of how many are actually infected or what is the correct R or CFR or which way it spreads. Just look how it's impacting the local health care system. If it exceeds the capacity by X % that's how big a problem it is.

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Spot on. Too many comments are see-sawing on details of parameters and trade offs but just talk to a doctor in NYC, they are out of room in ICUs and terrified about triaging that will start taking place.

Mt. Sinai in NYC is not currently reporting shortages of any kind. They are preparing for shortages, but are not currently experiencing them:

https://www.westsiderag.com/2020/03/23/mt-sinai-setting-up-o...

Perhaps you want to reconsider your news sources.

Hospitals in Italy are currently reporting dramatic shortages of many kinds.

CFR can give you an indication of how long its going to last. If its low and you're getting smashed, that tells you that significant portions of the population are getting infected and it will run out of steam sooner. Higher CFR tells you that the exceeded capacity will last for longer. That will impact the strategies you use.

> Just look how it's impacting the local health care system. If it exceeds the capacity by X % that's how big a problem it is.

Ok, let's look. There are 1175 serious/critical cases in the US [0]. I assume all of them are hospitalized, and mild cases are asked to stay home. There are 900k plus total hospital beds in the US, and 132K ICU beds [1], resulting in the current COVID demand from hospitals to be between 0.1% to 1% depending on how many of them need ICU beds. What am I missing? Before I am accused of not understanding exponentiation, I am all for prepping, but much alarm is about how we are already running out of capacity.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ [1] https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals

Say it's 1% and doubles every 3 days, that's 7 doublings away from over capacity or 21 days or 3 weeks time. Keep in mind bed to patient distribution is non uniform so we'll see shortage before then. Lockdowns take 12 days or so to see effect (from what Italy is seeing). So really, we have about 9 days to do a national lockdown.

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