[btilly]

I decided that some numbers on how things go wrong would help.

Suppose that the treatment increased deaths by 50% but delayed death by a week. And we have a doubling rate for the disease of 1 week.

Back of the envelope that means that the treatment will have 1.5x the deaths from when the disease happened 0.5 times as much for 0.75 of the deaths at any point in time. It looks like it saves 25% of lives when in fact it kills 50% more people. The raw numbers will look good until you look at a cohort over time.

Current doubling time for deaths has been about 3 days. My assumption of a week is therefore optimistic. Perhaps we get there with social distancing.