| > It's dawning on me that what China and South Korea are achieving, although impressive, leads to a lengthy stalemate that makes life impossible for millions of people. It's not a stalemate, they're still getting new cases at a pace that allows their medical system to cope. > In the absence of a vaccine It's a pretty safe bet one will become available pretty soon. Meanwhile, more is being learned about how to handle infections and improve the outcome. > the aim is to flatten the curve but still get the whole thing over and done with in about 6 months There are 4000 ICU beds in the country in total, most of which will be in use due to other kind of cases at any one time. [1] But let's assume you can make that number available for coronavirus patients for 6 months. So you have 4k*26 = 104k ICU bed-weeks available. There's been talk of 60% of the population getting infected to build up herd immunity [2] (somehow ignoring that there seems to be a nontrivial reinfection rate [3]), so almost 40 million people. It's not very clear how many infected people end up needing intensive care. In Italy, it was 10% of the people who tested positive [4]. But only the worst cases get tested once the epidemic is widespread, so let's say maybe 0.5% of the infected people need ICU (wild guess here since no country with a large number of infections is testing people with mild symptoms, but I think I'm being conservative). 0.5% of 40 million is 200k patients. If each of them need an ICU bed for 2 weeks, that's 400k bed-weeks. Basically we're talking about most of the 6 months period of the NHS being overwhelmed and coronavirus having a high mortality rate. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51714498 [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-herd-i... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-... [4] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans... |