This was my understanding as well, and it is what is shown in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatten_the_curve
The bigger thing that I have chatted about with several other is that the area under the curve is the same, i.e. the same amount of inidividuals will still get sick.
You flatten the curve to buy time for medical advancements, which will reduce the total area under the curve. It can be any or all of:
1) flattening the curve enough to make contact tracing viable, which can eradicate breakouts before they take hold
2) finding a decent anti-viral treatment so that number of deaths or "permanent damage" cases decrease, even if # of cases does not
3) developing a vaccine
This thing about "area under the curve remaining the same" is only true for calculus, it has no bearing on real life because we are making medical advances.
Aside from medical advancements, if the health care personnel is not overworked, overstressed, overtired, patients have a better chance to survive.
Flattening the curve means lives saved.
Not to mention hospitals usually shutting down elective procedures once the amount of infected patients in their care crosses a certain threshold.
If we had taken decisive action in January or February, we would have had enough resources for contact tracing, and really limit the spread. Instead we'll see at least 200K deaths from this before it is over.
Looking at the new case counts for the USA vs. the EU makes me sad and angry.
When 2 Mother's Day gatherings account for 50% of the cases in Santa Cruz county, what can you do short of saying "You're a moron."
It probably also doesn't help that a lot of Arizonans travel to California at this time of year to escape the heat.
* Forcibly testing people regularly
* Forcibly quarantining people who test positive
* Mandating contact tracing regardless of personal preference
* Imposing travel restrictions on hot spots with actual blockades
* Restricting any gatherings that aren't essential, with "essential" actually meaning essential (grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals, etc) rather than politically necessary.
* Mandating correct wearing of masks
* Closing borders or requiring quarantine upon entry
In effect, we need to do what China did. We absolutely lack the political will to do that in the US for a variety of reasons, and so we will not be able to approach containment until we get a vaccine.
most people do not want that at all
I most certainly not want to be forcibly tested or mandated to "correctly" wear the mask and you can fuck off you do
Look for example at Norway and Sweden. Norway took drastic measures early and were able to stop the spread to such a degree that schools opened up again after Easter and everything is almost back to normal now. Sweden did not take very drastic measures early and have had massive spread and 20 times more fatalities than Norway and now they have in many regards stricter social distancing rules than than Norway.
After a certain point it seems like you have to either shut down society for a long period of time (Italy) or just let it run its course through society somewhat controlled.
Austria and Italy, share a border, have ski lodges in the same Alps. Austria got off easy even though they had a one of the first outbreaks, Italy got hammered for two months. Yet Italy locked down harder during all this time.
I don't know in what way is Norway different from Sweden, Norway looks and feels a lot more rural and sparse. Sweden more cosmopolitan.
You could also compare Sweden to Denmark which is more similar than Norway. Denmark took drastic measures quite early and were able to get it under control.
Further to that I agree it's too early to say what is the best strategy long term. All epidemiologists in Scandinavia basically agreed with the Swedish approach in the beginning of the outbreak, but politicians in Norway and Denmark thought otherwise. I guess epidemiologists didn't think it was an option to basically lock down a modern country for several months and maintain social distancing rules for months on end. If this works until the end I assume the books on the subject will be rewritten ...
With the assumption that every vaccinated person counts towards herd immunity and isn't likely to die, you can plug in your own numbers to the equation above. Even with really conservative estimates, it's easy* to get into the millions when you consider the entire planet.
*Barring some highly effective treatments that may or may not surface.
You need the lower IFR, not the CFR, here.
At this time we don't know how effective any of the vaccine candidates will be.
kids and young adults have less than 1/100,000 chance of dying of COVID. The vaccine needs to be better than that. There is an ethical issue at hand of vaccinating people that are not at risk to save those that are at risk.
For reference after administering 3.1 billion vaccines the US paid damages in about 3,000 cases thus across all vaccines the rate of serious side effects is about 1 in a hundred thousand (considering about 10 vaccines per individual).
There is no vaccine that we currently mandate for the sole reason of protecting someone else.
The fundamental requirement of the Hippocratic Oath is "First, do no harm". If you are vaccinating someone, you better cause less damage to that person than the disease itself would do.
I have a kid, I am not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch of imagination: the whole family gets flu shots every single year.
But will I rush to get my kid vaccinated with a new thing rushed to market during a exaggerated hysteria, a vaccine not properly vetted for long term effects ... uhh most certainly not. I am going to wait a couple of years to see how others will fare.
(FYI I work in life sciences and I like to believe that I understand the inner workings of a living cell better than overwhelming majority of the population)
And as far as COVID vaccinations go, you're trying to have your cake and eat it. Either COVID-19 isn't risky/dangerous for young people, (meaning we can safely vaccinate them), or it's dangerous to them. If you're trying to say that a vaccine for COVID-19 would have worse effects than the disease itself, I think this would be extremely unlikely, since it doesn't occur with other vaccines.
If a COVID vaccination has a 1 in 100K rate of deleterious side effects (up to and including COVID-19) in the general population, then vaccinating the US population (330M) would result in 3300 cases of COVID (or bad side effects). The benefit of this would be saving roughly 2M people from death, and countless others from hospitalization and long term complications.
As for the other content, it just shows you don't understand what kind of problems an insufficiently tested vaccine could cause. You should educate yourself better:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/dengue-vaccine-fiasc...
Of course no one wants to take a vaccine that didn't undergo proper clinical trials. The argument was whether a vaccine that had typical side effect ratios would be ethical.
I don't think we disagree about the new vaccine risk level, since we don't have a vaccine, nor know anything about its side effects.
If a vaccine is has differing risks based on age group, then I would hope that we vaccinate the lowest risk group; assuming the risk variance is significant.
As a society, vaccinations are naturally government infringement upon individual rights. But a well-functioning society routinely infringes on individual rights. We place children in protective services when their parents don't care for them properly (in the mind of the government). We (in extreme times) invoke a draft for military personnel. As my dad used to say, your right to swing your fist stops at my nose. Rights are not inviolable; though care should be taken to limit infringement.
As SC Justice Robert Jackson once said, the protections afforded by the Constitution "must not be discredited by an interpretation to mean liberty without law."
I don't feel that you answered my questions directly, but if I understand correctly, it appears that you would hypothetically favor compulsory vaccination of children for the greater good, even if the personal risk outweighs the benefit.
I wholeheartedly disagree, as I do with the draft. Similarly, I 'think the right not to be punched, is analogous to forcing someone else to vaccinate for your benefit.
As a society, we get to decide what impositions we impose on individual liberty. Where would you draw this line?
I draw the line at criminal charges for failure to vaccinate.
infection fatality rate is the observed death rate based on all (known+undetected) cases
the Swedish report indicates of infection fatality rate of 0.1%
That's incorrect. The IFR in Stockholm (the epicenter for COVID-19) in Sweden is .6% currently [0]. Only if you exclude anyone above 70 do you get an IFR of .1%. According to [1] 20% of the population is 65 and older, roughly 2m people.
[0]https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...
[1]https://www.indexmundi.com/sweden/demographics_profile.html
FWIW the IFR is getting tiny as for younger people so using the the same preventive measures for low risk people that we use for high risk ones does not make much sense
Do you have a specific source that can explain it?
Basically, the number of infections peaks at the point where - due to some combination of immunity and measures like social distancing - each person infects at most one other person on average. However, there are still a whole bunch of infected and susceptible people spreading the disease, meaning that quite a lot more people then become infected than is actually necessary to end the outbreak. If you assume no attempt to flatten the curve, then a lot more people become infected than the herd immunity threshold, and that's what the NYT and co have focused on. However, one consequence is that flattening the curve without fully surpressing the outbreak reduces overall infections and deaths - the peak is lower and happens after fewer total infections, making it possible to build a whole bunch of herd immunity without all the extra infections and deaths from massively overshooting it.
I have never been able flattening the curve. If people would just stay home for a month and take precautions this would be over as it wouldn't spread and those who have it get over it. The details of living like that are tricky but too many people didn't try.
https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2020/05/health-car...