That's definitely a risk. And I think the NHS in the UK allows them to better respond to that risk by triaging patients and selecting who needs to stay at home and who needs to be admitted.

But the point I keep hearing from knowledgable people is that rapid spread is inevitable at this point. So many or most of the dramatic actions taken by state and federal governments now are security theater.

> point I keep hearing from knowledgable people is that rapid spread is inevitable at this point.

The point I keep hearing from every reputable epidemiologist, virologist, and public health expert around the world is that people need to stay the fuck at home because this virus is extremely dangerous and if left unchecked will completely overwhelm every hospital system in the world.

Some public officials didn’t believe it when it was just Hubei, but after seeing the same happen in Lombardy, a rich region in Europe with a strong healthcare system, the situation became clearer.

Edit: here’s a nice summary written by a Bay Area marketing executive (based on work by epidemiologists and others) https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

I'm pointing to the decision made by the National Health Service -- and you're countering with a bay area marketing executive's hot take on Medium?

No, I’m responding with a piece written by a nonspecialist with a general data/technical background who is also an excellent writer, who spent a bunch of time reading and digesting data and arguments published by epidemiologists and public health experts, and then synthesized that into one clear and coherent summary aimed at a lay audience, including many links to the direct sources so that readers can click through to evaluate them.

* * *

If you spend some time hunting around for career epidemiologists and other experts to read, they are as far as I can tell unified in opposition to the British plan, and have been calling it out as sheer folly in published opinion pieces and ranting about it on twitter.

For example, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/uk-cov...

I guess we’ll all see how things play out in the next month or two, but I’d much rather be in South Korea or Taiwan than England right now.

If you want something more reputable, how about Imperial College London’s epidemiologists:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

It's not just rare cases. 12% of the people in hospital in Italy are under age 50.