Flattening the Curve

For anyone like me who first thought "overkill", this is a nice short video, how disease outbreaks rise and fall.   Non political.  

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fgBla7RepXU

Thanks for posting this! Takes me back to the days when I almost failed calculus (got a B-minus thanks to a miracle performance on the final, lol).

My takeaway (probably not the one the author of the video intended) is that there's little personal benefit to social isolation in a situation like the present---you're still going to be exposed, so all you've really done from your point of view is make yourself miserable (and poorer) while you await the inevitable.

However, social isolation has a societal benefit. You postpone your risk of infection, or actual infection, as long as possible. Therefore, you're not in the way when your neighbor gets sick and has to be wheeled into the ICU. And he's hopefully out of the way--recovered, or dead---by the time YOU need that ICU bed.

So by staying home in our fortified bunkers and watching Netflix until we want to throw up, we're essentially buying a lottery ticket (and hoping to not win). And society benefits when everyone has bought a ticket.

For those of you familiar with the concept, it's kind of like a reverse tragedy of the commons. From a personal standpoint, right now, you and I might be better off to visit a coronavirus ward and encourage everyone to cough on us. That way, if we did develop Covid-19, it would be before care facilities were overwhelmed. But it would be an extremely selfish thing to do, even if it might improve our personal survival chances.

Nice video.   And, yes, its good to show  every high school senior who inevtiably argues that calculus has no practical purpose.    (I was once one of those).

I would like to see the government simply let the virus run its course, with no efforts to slow it down.  The damage that a drawn-out process will do to the economy is staggering.  With a flat curve, fewer may die from the infection, yet far more will die due to a lack of money and resources.  Getting it done fast, in my mind, is the most humane way for this to happen.

Sometime, we must choose difficult paths.

Run it's course? And just how long, time wise, will that be?

It'll take three months for this virus to run it's course if we urge people to return to their normal lives.  It's spreading very fast in China and accelerating by the day.  About 150,000 new cases in ten days, with 30,000 new cases yesterday alone.   They'll be hitting 60,000 new cases a day within a week or sooner.

And many tell us that China has this thing tamped down.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/

Right now the virus hospitalizes about 8% of the population who get it....which is to say they require ventilators and other Intesive care treatment to get through it.    7 in 8 of those people will recover in the hospital with that care.   1 of them dies.    

In your preferred scenario - 

The mortality rate of the disease goes much, much higher if those 7 of 8  people dont get access to intensive care.   Not thousands of people ..... millions.      Almost certainly several people you know personally.

Slowing it down saves millions of lives.  Its that simple.   

Look on the bright side - its not like Trump was going to run for re-election on his work with the deficit anyway.    

I wonder if someday, a majority of the population will be able to tell the difference between "its" and "it's"...my phone sure can't. Anyway...

The problem with just saying the hell with it and letting everybody get infected is that would maximize the mortality rate, as some afflicted do survive with hospitalization and intensive care....but a rapid increase in cases can make those services unavailable to many. There would also be an increase in mortality of non-Covid cases.

There's also the issue that we don't know that getting it and recovering necessarily confers immunity. We also don't know if recovered patients might be susceptible to a mutated form of the virus--after all, the current version is itself a mutation.

I think the best approach now is to exert maximum effort to ramp up hospital capacity, test kit production, and supplies production. I can't believe the military isn't being deployed to set up field hospitals in hard-hit areas.

My recurring impression is, yeah, a lot of the things being done now are useful, but why the fuck weren't we doing all of them two months ago? I mean, yeah, maybe then, it wasn't obvious what would happen, but couldn't we have taken simple and easy precautions such as making more protective gear?

In my day (class of '65) few girls took calculus.  Female nerds, I'm sure.  They only went on to work for NASA, or teach at MIT or some such.  

Hindsight is 100%. Finger pointing does not help. This is a time to follow guidelines for staying safe and healthy.