[wwweston]

> "we need to flatten the curve so that everyone gets it over 41 years!"

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.

[zamfi]

5% of cases need hospitalization for ~2-3 weeks; 2% require an ICU; 1% a ventilator. We have 96k ICU beds (and 160k ventilators) in the USA. Most constrained means we can't have more than 4.8 million sick at a given time -- but that's over 2-3 weeks, which yields ~2-3 years for 200 million people.

I assume the "41 years" people are using some other constraint.

[wwweston]

Thanks, it’s the 2-3 weeks factor I was missing (and I don’t even know if that’s optimistic I suppose).