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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't make any sense that we continue the lockdown in its current state.

Hospitals in California aren't overrun. We were insisted upon that the "flattening the curve" was to prevent the medical system from being overwhelmed. With what we've been able to do, we're not even close to having overrun hospitals. By now, we should have ramped up the system to account for greater numbers of severe cases.

Given that, we should quarantine the vulnerable population and allow the rest of the population to get things back to normal. Otherwise, we'll come out of this with no herd immunity, potentially making the last month a total loss, and creating further loss in the near future.

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Hospitals around me are at half capacity. San Mateo is at 56% capacity in ICU beds.[1]

Covid cases were doubling every 3 days (up to 5).

Would it be correct to say that had we waited another week, hospitals would have been overrun?

If that's the case then I understand why health authorities are cautious.

[1] https://www.smchealth.org/post/san-mateo-county-covid-19-dat...

Typically a hospitals run at near full capacity, especially during flu season.

I have a friend who works at the Kaiser in Oakland in ER, and she says it has been pretty empty right now, relative to a typical flu season.

The data linked shows about half the beds are taken up by COVID-19 patients, and the other half are other cases. They claim to have 77 standard ICU beds, and 300 surge beds available. Of those, 34% of the standard and 94% of the surge beds are unused. So out of 377 total beds, 5% are taken up by COVID-19 patients.

I think it's hard to estimate the doubling rate based on the numbers we have out there. Confirmed cases is a poor proxy for actual cases, since it depends a lot on testing rates, who gets tested, etc. A lot of new data is suggesting that coronavirus spread further we previously though, and that it started spreading in America sooner than we previously though. We don't know the true numbers because they didn't start testing for coronavirus in America until March, and even then it was at a very low rate.

Covid-19 grows at a doubling rate of ~5 days or so (obviously can vary based on a bunch of things). So to say that "we're not even close to having overrun hospitals" is kind of a farce.

If you filled up 25% of capacity with Covid patients, then you were only 2 doubling cycles (10 days) away from being having completely full hospitals. I don't think a 10 day buffer means that you're not even close to having overrun hospitals.

Maybe i'm misunderstanding but the entire point of whats outlined is to be prepared for the next wave. Sure we're flattening the curve, and we'll eventually have to relax the stay at home mandate, but its very possible that it will just get out of control again. Until the govt feels they can handle the next wave properly they don't want to take the chance.

Agreed, and it's worth noting that the death rate from economic damage could be significantly higher than the death rate from coronavirus.

For each 1% increase in unemployment, several thousand people die. Unemployment substantially increases the risk of mortality.

Let’s say the unemployment jumps to 30%, which is conceivable, but awful.

That would mean 200-300k people die from increased unemployment. Terrible.

The new virus’s worst case is more along the lines of 2-3 million, and at that point we’re probably in health care meltdown which would make it much worse than even those staggering numbers.

So yes, we don’t want to shut down the economy for 6 months, but it’s critical that we don’t swerve too far out of control. We can pay people to stay alive. We can’t wave a financial wand and solve the virus.

We can pay people to stay alive in the short term. In the long term, the economy is what allows the average American to live better than the average Ghanaian. 6 months of an essentials only economy - a subsistence economy, it's typically called - would do incredible and irreparable damage.

Is the source on this fact “The Big Short”? Because, it’s contested and not black and white.

Mortality rates actually decreased during the Great Depression.

Also, this isn’t a normal “unemployment” situation either — disaster relief isn’t out of the question.

No, but I can't remember the source. Iirc if unemployed you have a >2.5x mortality rate of someone employed.

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