> Society has to get used to the paradigm that 50% are asymptomatic and can return to the economy, while at the same time compromising for the other 50% that need to stay home and quarantine.
Nobody knows who they are until they get infected (and sometimes not even then, if they don't present much). 50% of the people going back and half of them having problems would still completely overflow all our healthcare capacity and many of them would die.
The perfect plan would be to massively ramp-up the healthcare system capacity as fast as possible and to fit those that need extra attention to our ability to provide it perfectly. The problems with this are manifold:
- The time the professional help is needed is often a week or more after infection and long after they've been contagious, making planning hard.
- Knowing how people interact and congregate and spread the disease is essentially unknowable when people are actually interacting, so the only way to have any semblance of forecasting ability is to prevent interactions.
- Having surplus capacity by 10% doesn't kill anyone. Having surplus patients you can't handle by 10% means deaths, and at a high percentage rate (I wouldn't be surprised if it's 10% of that cohort or higher). As the capacity ramps up, we're also talking about really large numbers. If we can handle 10 million people in the healthcare system, being off my 10% and having 10% of those die because of it is 100,000 people.
- The spread is not even, there will be hot spots that outstrip local capacity while remote capacity is underutilized.
Right now we have people afraid, but we don't have a massive panic so much, depending on where you are. Once a lot more people start dying, and people around you that you know, then real panic will start, and that might make any economic problems we're seeing now look tame comparatively.