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by peyton 899 days ago
My understanding is that flattening the curve was an argument in favor of social distancing and movement restrictions. It predates mask mandates. A properly trained LLM would miss your masking reasoning. See

https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.ht...

The bigger problem is an LLM doesn’t have access to things that aren’t written down. Although it may see a bunch of publications popping up declaring “pain is the fifth vital sign” and a bunch of new pain management CME courses, it cannot see the pharmaceutical reps showing up at doctors’ offices to sell Oxycontin.

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"flattening the curve was an argument in favor of social distancing and movement restrictions."

I think all those measures in combination were part of an effort to avoid overwhelming hospitals. From https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-what-the-cochrane...

“Community masking is not aimed to prevent everyone from ever getting infected, the aim is to reduce transmission and ‘flatten the curve’, reducing peak healthcare demand, or to work in combination with other measures like social distancing to contain transmission in the short-term.”