teedubbya wrote:It is all about managing the workloads trying not to overwhelm local health care systems and hopefully improving outcomes. That's what's funny about the automobile accident screaming chimps. Try having them all at once let alone having the idiot drivers drive in to masses of people that are not in cars.
In the end I still don't know the end game. it seems to me like most people need to get sick at some point. the vaccine would be one good end point but we are acting like it is a certainty. we don't know for sure how long it will take, its efficacy or even if our own antibodies provide immunity. Combine that with once the vaccine is developed how is it mass produced and distributed (hopefully better than the tests?)
I'm not smart enough to see a good way out. I think the path that has been laid out is about as good as it gets and the states or localities not following it are playing with fire.... especially since their economy isn't in a vacuum and relies on others.
This thing is going to eff things up for a long time. The immediate gratification crowd is going to be disappointed.
I vacillate on an "end game".
If the end game really is just avoiding over-stressing our hospital infrastructure... I'd almost argue it was successful. We bought ourselves (theoretically) enough time to stock up on necessary PPE (yes, I know, I'm laughing too) and we can theoretically open everything right now. Areas that get hit hard, will use the now-developed supply chains to ensure necessary equipment gets to the hospitals...
It almost seems like some countries did the self-isolation so well that they actually were able to control the spread of the virus. They could theoretically open up with very few transmitted cases. In theory, with appropriate controls they could keep on top of those and actually not see any spiking.
For a while I thought we were going to try to achieve that. We fail miserably at that though. If you look at our graph of new cases compared to countries which actually shut down... we've been holding steady at 20-30k new cases a day for 3 weeks now. most countries go down after the peak. Not us. That means to me that if we re-open we'll see some fun spikes.
Vaccine would be excellent.
Herd immunity is possible, but not without first going through a pretty significant death rate (looks like a couple magnitudes larger than currently)