![]() ![]() Is flattening the curve just another name for the “have a control system to titrate lockdown levels so that only the right number of people get it at a time” strategy? Maybe everyone just assumes that we’re never going to get the cases down to too low a level, so we should try to get them as low as possible and maybe hit the right amount? And overshooting and reducing it so far that you’re not using the medical capacity you have, and wasting an opportunity to have a normal life and/or build herd immunity, is just really unlikely without China-level resources?Īn article called Flattening The Curve Is A Deadly Delusion has been going around this part of the Internet, saying that there’s basically no way to match a curve of any flatness with our current hospital capacity. So maybe the end date isn’t “have a vaccine available”, it’s “have millions of test kits available”, which I think looks more like a few months than like years and years. The closest thing I’ve heard is “what China and South Korea are doing”, which seems to be having so many tests available, and such good health services, that it’s easy to detect cases, track down their contacts, and manage the epidemic even while life goes on mostly as usual. Problem: it would take forever to develop herd immunity under this system, and we might just have to keep turning quarantine on and off for a year or two until a vaccine gets developed. Control systems are the solution to everything! That way at least we can have a few weeks of normal economic activity and seeing friends in between each lockdown. Relax social distancing levels, then after ICU cases cross some threshold, reinstate them again. The blue line is government-mandated social distancing levels. A paper yesterday out of Imperial College London ( discussed here) said the same thing, arguing for alternating periods of higher and lower quarantine levels based on how the medical system was doing: This would eventually develop herd immunity without overwhelming the medical system. Last week I predicted that this might look like titrating quarantine levels – locking everything down, then trying to unlock it just enough to use available medical capacity, then locking things down more again if it looked like the number of cases was starting to get out of hand. If we don’t get a deus ex machina, eventually somebody will need to implement some long-term strategy. Everyone is hoping for a quick vaccine or antiviral, but this is a field where “quick” sometimes means months or years instead of decades. Here’s another critique of herd immunity, appropriately enough on .īut the UK’s original point – that without herd immunity, all we can do is continue the lockdown until something happens – remains sound and worrying. They’ve since backtracked after people did the math and found that an epidemic even among healthy young people only would overwhelm their medical system. I think it’s more likely that Hollywood actors and Iranian politicians have 100x higher risk than their host population, than that epidemiologists are wrong about the size of the epidemic by orders of magnitude.Ī brief flurry of interest last week as the UK seemed to be trying a different strategy from everyone else – isolating their oldest and most vulnerable citizens, but letting everyone else get the virus to build herd immunity. And they mostly interact with other famous people, forming their own little “compartment” where the epidemic can be worse than in other societies. Famous people travel a lot and shake a lot of hands. Given that Iran’s vice-president is affected, what are the chances that only 1/12,000 of Iranians had the virus? Some people calculated it out and found that hundreds of thousands of Iranians must be affected for the prevalence among politicians to make sense, suggesting ratios of 100x or even 1000x. ![]() The Atlantic makes this case more formally. What about the evidence from famous people? If only 100,000 Americans are infected, it’s pretty weird that it would hit both Tom Hanks and Idris Elba (also, Tormund from Game of Thrones). You’re probably all already following the map of cases per country, but you can supplement with this map of how many tests each country is running per million people (h/t curryeater259 from the subreddit) Probably this number is different in every country, depending on their test rates. So it seems like most people are converging around 5 – 20. A study in Science ( article, paper) estimates 86% are undetected, for about 7x. In this US News article, scientists estimate 9000 true cases back when the official count was 600, suggesting 15x, and BBC estimates 10,000 real cases in the UK to 500 official ones, suggesting 20x. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice.Īs of today, the US has almost 10,000 official cases. As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. ![]()
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