| This is not clear. Right now we need lockdown because: a) We have a large number of infected people (> 10,000) and have no idea who or where they are, because testing sucks. b) If exponential growth continues (and it would, because we can't isolate all the people who are sick right now), we'll overwhelm hospital facilities and the fatality rate will hit 5% instead of <1%. BUT As soon as we clear out a), that kills b) too -- in South Korea they're doing effective contact tracing, testing, and isolation because they have few enough cases. Once we bend the knee of the growth curve, once we get get R0 below 1, we'll have exponential drop-off instead of growth. In 8 weeks, with few enough active cases and robust testing infrastructure, we'll be able to do what China has started doing, and what SK has been doing all along. Of course, that's assuming we get our act together on lockdown & testing infrastructure. But if we do, we could be out of lockdown by June. All these folks saying "we need to flatten the curve so that everyone gets it over 41 years!" are extrapolating the wrong data points... |
Is this hyperbole, or is anyone actually saying 41 years?
I haven't done careful math, but eyeballing it, roughly a year (give or take some months) is the longest I'd come up with to keep peak simultaneous cases under 1.5mil.