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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

It didn't happen because we locked down and flattened the curve. Remember those first couple weeks when it was doubling so fast it was hard to keep count of the cases and the hospital system came close to breaking under the stress? We stopped that from crashing the system by staying indoors. The models said, here's what'll happen if things continue as they are. They didnt say what would happen if we implemented a lockdown, so of course they were "wrong." Not only did we keep the system from blowing it's capacity, we also gave ourselves enough time to learn about how to treat the disease (ventilators worse than we thought, remdesivir, etc) so even if we get the same number of cases as we would have without lockdown, we've time shifted a lot of them to a point where we know more about the disease. So, things went pretty well.

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> it was doubling so fast it was hard to keep count of the cases and the hospital system came close to breaking under the stress?

In the majority of the country hospitals did not come any where close to breaking. Please don't spread fake news.

I'm referring to New York, not the rest of the country. I'm not talking about the majority of the country. The comment I'm replying to is apparently [flagged] [dead], so maybe it's not visible? For context, my comment is responding to a comment that is regarding the projections for NY and "Furher Cuomo's" response to it. My reply is discussing what was happening in new york. certainly the response we had here would not have made sense in another area that wasnt on the edge of hospital system collapse, but that's not what this comment chain and thread is discussing, it's discussing New York.

I see. Yes, the comment didn't appear and I thought this was a reply to the main article.

The problem is that exponential growth looks flat until it looks vertical.

People either get this or they don't or they choose not to.

New York was going vertical. The rest of the country went "Oh, hell, no" and locked down to prevent that from even starting.

But, it's okay. We're running a nice set of experiments right now with the experimental group (red states reopening) vs control group (blue states staying locked down until criteria are met). We'll get lots of nice data in about 3 weeks.

Exponential growth is never vertical. Why must we resort to hyperbole when the truth is scary enough?

To a first order approximation it is.

And the reason we need to try analogies and hyperbole is because even people who are arguing in good faith don't get exponential growth.

Normal people look at 2 on day 1, 4 on day 4, 8 on day 7 and think "Oh, about 4 every 3 days. Shrug. No big deal." Horizontal.

Epidemiologists look at that and go "AHHHHH! Doubling every 3 days. Shut everything down or we'll have a million in 2 months and 10 million a week later." They're looking at the vertical section of the curve.

This is similar to people misunderstanding fire. Most people have experienced a campfire. The energy drops off like 1/r^3, so it's no big deal. Most people haven't experienced a wind driven wall of flame where the energy drops off like 1/r so things simply spontaneously combust next to the flamefront. And that's just cubic vs linear.

> Normal people look at 2 on day 1, 4 on day 4, 8 on day 7 and think "Oh, about 4 every 3 days. Shrug. No big deal." Horizontal.

Yeah well HN is mostly a bunch of software engineers who spend most of their day relying on the fundamental that at the end of 32 days in your example, there'll be 4 billion, so...

On the other hand your example is extremely contrived, because exponential growth in epidemiology is mostly not possible except for short periods.

You’re incorrect. Figures were doubling in the first few weeks because testing was ramping up. More testing = more infected. And this may be a shock to you but the virus didn’t come to NY or the state in March or Feb. It’s been around since December if not earlier. Govt officials believed those projections and prepped the Javits center and brought in that Navy hospital. Cuomo begged for ventilators that he already had and forced elderly back into their assisted care homes.

What’s happening here has nothing to do with health or safety.

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