Quote:
Originally Posted by jtown,man
At what point do we stop staying home? 2 weeks? 2 months? When?
At some point we have to realize we are doing more damage destroying people's lives than we are doing good. And don't give me the "we have to save lives!" line. Of course, we do, but we also have over 30,000 people die a year from car wrecks. Are we doing everything possible to limit those deaths? NO. We are not. We still have fast roads. Why? Because the economy would be so fucked if the speed limit nationwide went to like 10 mph.
We need some hard data from South Korea to find out who exactly is the most at risk(we can guess, but yeah we need facts) and then after two weeks of lockdown the rest of us go back to our lives and the at-risk population stays inside.
EDIT: No, I don't think what we are doing now is stupid or unwarranted. I just want some hope. I have no heard one word from a credible source on when we can go back to normal. Just estimates...from people I don't trust(Trump or my friend on Facebook).
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We're not talking about 30,000 people a year though. This could easily kill a million in the span of a week or two at the peak of the pandemic in the US alone if the spreading of the virus is allowed to go unchecked.
The data from South Korea seems to be pointing towards a death rate of about 2% among their population which is honestly pretty high, considering a lot of the people infected there were pretty young, their healthcare system was not over-extended, and they are probably healthier than Americans.
Anyways, so far it seems like young healthy people are at relatively low risk. It's important to remember that there are a lot of things that could cause one to be classified as unhealthy though, it's certainly more than people on life support. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease/smoking, and being immunocompromised are all major risk factors. I suspect a rather big chunk of the working age population has at least one of those conditions.
It also seems like the risk for young healthy people to need enriched oxygen support or even ventilators due to pneumonia is not that low, it's just that if they are provided with that treatment, they have a much better chance of recovery than those in weaker health. So we still want to make sure our health system is not overwhelmed to make sure that they can be provided with those kinds of treatments, which is a very real concern.
The virus has the ability to spread very fast from the looks of it, so fast that it seems possible for over 50% of the population to be infected at the same time. If you have 5 million Americans needing critical care at the same time, and about 120,000 ICUs currently, with maybe around 40,000 unoccupied, and the ability to expand that to 150,000 ICUs dedicated to COVID patients thanks emergency mobilization measures , that's still far below what would be needed. So you'd still need significant measures to limit the spread.
And think what will be needed in most countries is a lockdown first, lasting maybe 6-8 weeks, to give the chance for the testing infrastructure to catch up and for our healthcare system to restock supplies and expand capacity. Then allow people - at least the lower risk people - to get back to work in greater numbers, while still taking significantly greater precautions to limit spread than under regular flu season, and also testing and contact tracing aggressively like South Korea is doing to make sure anyone that's infected is placed in full isolation until they recover. If we do that, I think we should be able to suppress the spreading down the levels our healthcare system can manage until a vaccine is found.
However, right now, I suspect the number of people walking around spreading the virus, not knowing they have it, is probably dangerously high and above what our current testing and contact tracing infrastructure can manage.
United States currently has about 55,000 confirmed cases.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's another 25,000 or so that are pending - they've been approved to be tested/tested, but we're still waiting for the analysis to come back.
Maybe another 100,000 have mild symptoms, and either haven't called the doctor, or aren't eligible for testing because their symptoms aren't severe enough.
Then there might be another 250,000 who are infected and will develop symptoms later, but haven't developed symptoms yet because they're still in the incubation phase.
And there might be another 250,000 who have it but will never develop symptoms.
So there could be half a million infected in the US that we don't even know about.
I think it's still possible to catch a lot of those asymptomatic people. If they gave the virus or got it from someone who has symptoms, then testing everyone that someone with symptoms has been in contact with could catch a lot of asymptomatic cases. And then you test all the contacts of the known asymptomatic cases... I'm also hoping that asymptomatic people are less infectious.
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