How come, I thought there was no cure?

Early detection does two things: 1. Allows you to isolate the person before they spread it further. 2. Allows you to be ready to treat their pneumonia which increases their survival chances.

You said early detection leads to better outcomes - so point 1 doesn't apply. Treating pheumonia is last stage process, early detection does nothing to help help here as well.

It’s possible to contain a small outbreak, much more difficult to contain a large one. Think of it like a California brush fire:

- If someone is witness to the start of the fire, they’re going to call the fire department who will mobilize all resources available to a small area -> fire is contained quickly and with minimal loss of life or property

- If the fire starts in a remote area with nobody around for miles, it will get bigger and avoid detection until it becomes an imminent risk to people. At that point, the same resources will be spread across a larger area. As the wildfire grows, the wind caries embers and sparks other fires miles away, making the situation worse.

Good question. Since once someone is infected, how can early detection and being under quarantine help in recovery?

The answer is that with early detection, and keeping the virus numbers low, the health care network can be kept free for caring for the cases that do come through.

And ICU level care cannot cure the virus but can reduce fatalities.

Early detection means up to 100x more people overloading hospitals, doesn't it? It's much better to just stop as much as possible for 2 weeks - work from home etc.

successful containment yields lower peak cases which means medical infrastructure can cope better. there's no cure but there are worthwhile treatments.

"containment" doesn't mean "early detection". You can yield better "containment" by issuing strong recommendation to work from home and maximize staying at home for two weeks or so.

um, i agree.

The deaths tend to be from secondary effects, not covid-19 directly, i.e. the exacerbating pre-existing conditions such as lung problems or just being old or otherwise infirm. Early detection makes catching and managing those complications easier so the patient has a better chance of riding out covid-19 itself.

The SARS in SARS-CoV-2 stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. It's the primary infection that kills, such as by directly causing pneumonia.[1] By contrast, seasonal influenza deaths are usually by secondary infections, mostly bacterial pneumonia. The H1N1 influenza strain was more like SARSr-CoV in that deaths were usually from primary viral pneumonia.[2]

Obviously if you suffer from preexisting health issues, especially cardiopulmonary issues, you're far more likely to develop pneumonia, primary or secondary, or otherwise succumb.

[1] This page equivocates Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome with pneumonia: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/007192.htm

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...

There's no silver bullet "cure", but it turns out that ventilating people while their immune system deals with it allows a lot of people to recover.

What does it mean to "ventilate" a person?