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Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

But our hospitals do have enough capacity. So far we have not seen widespread hospital overruns as predicted. Army field hospitals were set up and then taken down with no one treated. New York wanted 40000 ventilators but only needed 5000. Surely we should increase availability, but the original predictions that inspired this level of lockdown have not come to pass and with the information we have now, we know they are just delaying the inevitable.

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At any given moment, the appropriate way to look at a fast spreading infectious disease is to consider the more likely range of potential outcomes, work for the best one and plan for the worst one.

When the work pays off with a better outcome, it's foolish to look back and criticize the planning for worse outcomes, especially when the tools to manage the infection are pretty limited (social distance works well, but it's a brutal tool, so you want to use it only as necessary).

> the original predictions that inspired this level of lockdown have not come to pass

The predictions of what would have happened had no lockdown been introduced then haven't materialized precisely because the lockdown have been executed.

That is no argument that the lockdown haven't been needed.

No, my claim is that the models that were used with the lockdown were wrong. Cuomo claimed to need 40k ventilators after the lockdown was put in place. He ended up needing only a fraction of that. Obviously, without the lockdown, there would likely be more needed. Of course, modeling has errors, but this is an extremely large error, and one that has direct policy implications.

Had the model's predictions been more accurate we could have found a better middle ground when it comes to lockdown. Every job saved and individual financially secure is one more person who can contribute to the community's well-being. I think it's pretty safe to say in retrospect that the lockdowns need not have been as draconian as they were. We had the hospital capacity to have less severe lockdowns and we should have done that. While we can't change the past, we can certainly look at how our models failed and rework our approach in the future. Anything else is irresponsible.

> No, my claim is that the models that were used with the lockdown were wrong. Cuomo claimed to need 40k ventilators after the lockdown was put in place. He ended up needing only a fraction of that.

What you state now reflects exactly how many casual observers have problems to understand the exponential nature of the epidemics: if one observes the doubling time of three days, and that is what has been observed, this means only that the difference between needing 10k ventilators and needing 40k ventilators is only 6 days -- less than a week! Nobody can wait to actually need them to order them and get them delivered in so short time frames!

It was surely not possible to predict reliably how would have people reactd to which kinds of measures requested of the people, and the exact impact to the slowing down the spread (when exactly would doubling time get to be how much longer as a response).

Having an error of just 6 days in the middle of the exponential growth is not so negative if you are attempting to allocate resources to avoid tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. And that statement of needing 40k ventilators is not what prevented some "better middle ground".

The "better middle ground" was surely possible to achieve by simply treating the epidemics much earlier as a serious issue and not acting as it is "just like flu" or would "disappear" overnight before anything has to be done.

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