If California’s “stay-at-home” order works and they extensively test everyone with suspected symptoms from now on, CA could be well on its way toward containment within a couple of months (not including ’imported’ cases from other states/countries).
I read that the paper cited does not include the effects of isolating cases and contact tracing to suppress new infections.
Added: Waiting period will result in asymptomatic people showing symptoms and they can then be tested and isolated. That is why the stay-at-home practice is useful during the incubation period. If the actual number of cases in CA is not too large and within family infections can be controlled, then part of everyday life can resume in about 1 month.
Why wouldn’t it be sustainable? As long as the supply chains hold I don’t see why it isn’t doable. There will be a severe economic impact but the alternative is worse.
Unless you have the military enforce the lockdown, people will eventually refuse to starve quietly in their houses and will brave the "terrifying" 1% chance of death from COVID to go back to being alive.
Honestly, with the governor this morning toying with "about 18 months", we are agreeing to give up more than 1% of our life just to reduce the risk of the 1% chance of death.
If you do order the military to enforce it, you are likely to end up with a civil war. Some people will eventually resist, and then either the army starts firing on Americans or they let people go on with their lives.
On a more personal note, the mental health cost of perfect social isolation is already getting to me, and frankly, I don't think I would survive more than a bare couple of months, even if the magic goods fairy delivered me every essential item I could ever want in infinite quantity.
Massive economic impact. After a couple of months, a good chunk of all retail businesses that aren't grocery stores are going to be irrecoverably bankrupt.
Sure but what happens if we do nothing for a month and let the virus spread rampant. Then we bankrupt the entire country paying for healthcare assistance packages for those who cannot afford it and are the hardest hit. Or would you recommend we just leave them sick on the streets?
The cost of healthcare for all of the illness even if 100% of the population got the virus this month is less than the economic destruction our self-imposed economic sanctions have already caused even if they ended today.
This is only true if you don't count the cost of massive casualties that are impossible to fully quantify the cost of and only count of the cost of running the healthcare system at existing capacity.
Let's cook up a fantasy scenario where we have unlimited resources and can treat as many patients as needed. Let's also optimistically pretend that only 1% of cases need ICU treatment. Take 1% of 327M and you get 3.2M ICU beds required. Now let's say that at the peak, half the population is sick (likely given the unmitigated exponential explosion scenario), meaning we need 1.6M ICU beds at the peak. We have roughly 100k ICU beds in the country, 1/16th what we need. The cost of those beds would be trillions of dollars. Of course we can't magically materialize ICU beds, so hundreds of thousands will die. I'd choose 6-12 months of the GFC over that _any day_.
Do you not believe these basic facts or just don't have empathy for other people who are at risk?
2: 12 months of not actually living is already giving up about 1.3% of the life of our whole population, and that's not counting the health problems caused by poverty or the mental health cost of eternal social isolation.
3:. There is no believable model where 100% of the population gets the illness. Even the absurdly pessimistic models end up at 60-70%
4: the models that assume nearly everyone gets sick require that there are already many, many, many undetected cases, which makes severity and mortality much lower than is being otherwise imagined
5:. This will sound callous, but 99% of fatal cases involve folks with other serious chronic illness, and at least 80% (good numbers are hard to find) are past retirement age. Though these people add.much value and happiness to our world, they aren't going to produce much more economic productivity. This doesn't mean they don't matter, but we were having a discussion on economics
Why do people think that waiting 2 weeks or 2 months will solve it? Only way that works is if enough people have it and now have immunity, which helps prevent spread when quarantine is over.
We are going to have a worse economic impact from mass quarantine than the 200 thousand people (mostly over 60) that would have died.
Because if everyone isolated for a month it wouldn't spread and die-out. Having a deadly flu in the public causing mass deaths and difficult recovery for the young would bring the worst economic impact out of both scenerios.
You mean 2.2 million right ? I mean the reason why is that most humans have compassion and don't want their parents and grandparents to die. I think that having empathy and wanting to prevent death of other humans is an admirable trait or our species.
> Why do people think that waiting 2 weeks or 2 months will solve it?
Who said it will solve it? It will flatten the curve as it already has in other countries, hopefully avoiding a catastrophic overload of the healthcare system.
The Imperial paper said that 2 months doesn't really flatten the curve enough to kill it off, given where we already are. You're just moving that peak to a later date, but it will still vastly exceed the healthcare capacity (we can't upscale it 8x in that amount of time).
Hence their conclusion is that we'll have to basically do this on and off, flattening the curve just enough that we can let it rebound for a while without overwhelming the system, until vaccine is available. Which they estimate as 18 months, out of which 12 will be on lockdown - however you space it out.
So yeah, the economic impact will be massive. But it doesn't have to translate to people dying, if we focus on preventing that. One person could feed themselves and others with the fruits of their labor since the agricultural revolution. It's a question of distribution, not of availability.
I read that the paper cited does not include the effects of isolating cases and contact tracing to suppress new infections.
Added: Waiting period will result in asymptomatic people showing symptoms and they can then be tested and isolated. That is why the stay-at-home practice is useful during the incubation period. If the actual number of cases in CA is not too large and within family infections can be controlled, then part of everyday life can resume in about 1 month.