So the plan is to just... everybody hide indoors until... what happens?
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But the latest discourse i've been seeing has been saying that flattening the curve enough will spread it out over a full decade and i don't think we plan on hiding indoors for that long
I think the best strategy might be to impose lockdowns until the region in question has no unaccounted new infections for two weeks.
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It's relative. China was able to massively curtail deaths by spreading it out over just a few months.
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We are already doing phase 1 testing on a vaccine and Germany is saying they will have a vaccine by the fall. We flatten the curve to avoid a 7%+ death rate they have in Italy by having hospitals less overwhelmed on that initial spike. Car crashes, heart attacks etc all more risk
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The actual realistic plan is to not flatten the curve but to eradicate as much as possible. Once the case count is down enough, and testing ubiquitous, possibly letting up on some quarantining while aggressively pursuing local outbreaks.
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The Imperial College team plugged infection and death rates from China/Korea/Italy into epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation: what happens if the US does absolutely nothing -- if we treat COVID-19 like the flu, go about our business, and let the virus take its course?
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therapeutics and vaccines should be here much sooner than that
Not over four years. No chance for that. Too late. Stretch it over a couple months will mean the difference between 1 or 2% mortality and 10%. On top of all the people that end up needing intubation for many different reasons not related to corona.
This is because people assume the same number of total long-term cases, while reducing transmission rate also reduces the number of total cases.
That issue is discussed here:
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With @jd_mathbio : The #flattenthecurve pictures are technically wrong, but conceptually right. Social distancing *both* flattens and shrinks the epidemic, but it flattens it more (which is more important). math.mcmaster.ca/bolker/misc/pe @CT_Bergstrom
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"Decade" is bad math. A perfectly flattened curve working at maximum efficiency would take between 205 and 441 days. But that's not going to happen, so we're going to end up triaging beds.
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