[yulaow]

A lot of young people still need icu treatments here in italy. If you don't flatten the curve early a lot of younglings too are gonna die and fast considering the very limited number of icu beds and the very high number of early contagions the uk seems to want to reach.

[vanniv]

Some will. Possibly more than would have if we spread the illness over time.

But that set of outcomes has risks and costs too.

But regardless, it isn't really clear that the curve-flattening efforts are even effective. Italy is clearly experiencing an utterly uncontrolled outbreak. Despite pretty much the maximum amount of lockdown possible to achieve.

Don't believe that they have only 20k cases, or only 3k new ones today -- even with their increase in testing, they are still strongly test limited; that's why the Italian mortality rate looks so absurdly high -- they still aren't detecting most of the mild cases. (Either that or somehow the Italian version of the virus is about 10x as deadly as the everywhere-else version)

It seems much more likely that the mortality rate everywhere is relatively similar and it is the detection rate that varies. (Notice how all of the places that have really thorough testing all have the lowest -- and similar -- mortality rates? And the places with really high mortality rates are those with known inadequate testing)

[yulaow]

To clarify current national-level lockdown effects are expected to be seen starting twelve days from now.

Some or the old red zones which covered the starting point of the infection are currently with 0 new detected cases since 3 days so it seems lockdown works IF u put them in place soon enough. [ https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... ]

[vanniv]

Of course, if you ever let up on the lockdown, the disease will immediately start spreading again.

[yulaow]

Exactly, but the government hope is to manage new cases with heavy tracking and testing as south korea is doing, so to keep the future spread far more under control. That's not possible until the current situation is resolved