[JoeAltmaier]

Folks are estimating many weeks, even months.

But consider: the doubling time is around 4-5 days. We'll hit 1M worldwide maybe Friday.

40 days after that, we'll hit 1B people. That's about the estimated total that typically get infected by a pandemic. Peak infection.

Two or three weeks after that, everybody will be through it. No problem; scars and health issues; death; whatever, it'll be over.

So 60 days to do anything and everything we hope to do with this. No more than that.

[dont__panic]

Without mitigation, sure. But of course the deaths, overwhelmed hospitals, etc. would be horrific.

Instead, we're trying to "flatten the curve" in most countries. This means we're directly trying to lower the doubling time, which means that we won't develop herd immunity the same way. Lots of pockets of never-infecteds will exist where COVID can crop up again.

I'd also caution estimating based on current "confirmed case" counts. Almost every country has suffered from test shortages, and even those that haven't had shortages haven't been testing everyone -- in most cases, if you aren't having trouble breathing, you're advised to just stay at home and assume you're infected. So honestly nobody knows just how many people are infected.

[JoeAltmaier]

Flattening surely is not going to work if everybody eventually get sick from this. We'd need 3M beds for a month each patient. Divide that by the number we have, it'd take 20 years of 'flattening' to make that work.

No, the reason to try and delay is only to give time for vaccines, better processes and treatments. That's the only path forward.

And it isn't happening fast enough. So there will be some suffering.

[blueboo]

Ah, but the big question is how much curve-flattening stretches it out in your country of residence.

Some societies will choose such that their medical infrastructure will be at 10x capacity for ten times as long rather than be at 100x capacity.

Others will manage to stamp it out, only to endure subsequent flare-ups.

Unconstrained doubling is only a popular policy among oligarchs in power. To be fair, they do have a lot of power...

[JoeAltmaier]

Evidence to date outside Asia is, zero flattening. Most places. Thus my estimate.

If you want to posit some slight flattening, then 70 day? No more.

The terrible power of geometric growth cannot be resisted for long. You need to change the growth rules entirely to beat it. No half-measures will do it.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Evidence to date outside Asia is, zero flattening

That's not true. "new daily deaths" are fairly flat in Italy over the last week, not doubling geometrically at all.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

If the lockdown is working in other countries, then a similar state will be reached 3 weeks afterwards.

Daily new cases is down in Italy since peak on 21 March - that's a leading metric compared to deaths, although it is less precise because it can be swayed by changes in testing.

[JoeAltmaier]

Well I hope its true. The curves have shown 'levelling off' before, only to return to geometric growth when testing increases.

E.g. click on a country on the left, select 'logarithmic' on the lower right and see what you think: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Sure, more time/data is needed to know for sure. If you factor in 1 week until symptoms, another 1-2 weeks until the worst part of the illness, then yes, the effect of lock down on death rates won't be seen until 2-3 weeks have passed.

This is the UK 2.5 weeks ago: https://twitter.com/stereophonics/status/1238944498006274048

[SideburnsOfDoom]

* Average time between infection and death from COVID-19 is 23 days. https://twitter.com/michaeljswalker/status/12454153391497052...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

So lockdown won't be reflected in death rates until _over_ 3 weeks have passed.

This is the UK, 3 weeks ago: https://twitter.com/stevethewall/status/1244249363427328003

[Rerarom]

Second this.