The Curve Is Not Flat Enough

I think the implication was that hospital staffs are overworked with Covid-19 but that normal every day emergency situations are still going to happen.

> Example, last time I looked at the stats, 20-40 had 0.2-0.4% chance of being critically ill from covid19.

Source? Because I think you'd need a lot more testing to say for sure, at least in the US

I stopped reading stories cause of this. Your likelyhood of getting critically ill is very small. The issue was never that it was always that our capacity since everyone will probably get sick is very small, but we aren't acting as if this is what we are dealing with

For decades? Thats the entire point of the US. Even the bodies won't change that

This comment seems to be unpopular but I have to admit, I really do think that a small portion of the US population treats this pandemic as an overblown distraction or treats it as fuel for some other conspiracy theory. I've experienced this first hand as someone I unfortunately live with was very vocal about how the coronavirus was created as a distraction by the media to avert our attentions to something about Iran and some other conspiracy crap. These people exist.

Didn’t help when the President said it was a hoax by political opponents. There’s another segment that believes every word he speaks even though it changes constantly. Also doesn’t help that WHO & CDC said masks don’t help when they have been proven to reduce transmission. So misinformation came from the highest levels of government and experts. The media also didn’t take it seriously (not just Fox News). People formed incorrect opinions and as you said until they see it for themselves it’s not a big deal in their minds since everyone said that for weeks. Not sure if there is a technical term for this when one forms an opinion and won’t change it even when new evidence is introduced.

> For decades large portions of the US population have prided themselves on ignoring whatever the government says.

The fault lies where? The government/state that has lied about pretty much everything or the people who have been lied to?

The amount of "believe government", "trust government", "obey government" throughout social media makes me wonder. Not to mention all the messaging about compliance. Even more astounding coming from someone who has "hack" in their username.

Also, "ignoring the government" to some degree and "civil disobedience" is part of being american. It's what separates the US from Britain, EU, China, etc.

That is insanity. Flat is absolutely the best we can do. Herd immunity is a fallacy when the result of loosening social distancing restrictions is to overwhelm the medical system and cause unnecessary death.

Let young people congregate? A healthy fraction of those hospitalized with COVID-19 are young. They may survive better, but they take up a lot of ventilators in the process. Run out of ventilators and those young people will die in large numbers.

No, the only reasonable endgame to COVID-19 is to flatten the curve and keep it flat until we have some treatment tools that work. Ultimately, a vaccine. But until then, drug therapies that have been proven out in reasonably sized trials.

What? Why don't we not risk another wave by letting people out and instead just wait for a vaccine before completely resuming normality. Less people die this way.

nostromo has made some good points.

We're not going to stay in lockdown for 18 months, which is what the estimate is for a cure.

If it's true that covid-19 doesn't like warm temperatures, that would be great, but that's still 2 months away for the USA.

Otherwise we need to start thinking of when to end lockdown, whether that's ideal or not.

Those certainly aren't Washington numbers, so where are you getting the "100 new cases a day" from?

Theres a MIT article about this. At some point this has to be lifted because the area of the curve will stay the same. 100,000 ICU is 100,000 ICU we are just spreading it out but we need to be efficient with the pace of it.

Doesn't it vary highly on the location and its surrounding population density? That's probably why it's so vague. But why does it matter? Exponential growth can reach extremely high numbers in short iterations. Maybe a smaller hospital in Ney Jersey will be overwhelmed a few days before a larger hospital in New York would be.

Local and state governments do simulations for the resources in their jurisdictions. I have seen some posted for NJ but can’t find them now and they would be out of date by now.