That'd be wonderful. But, doesn't that conflict with what we saw actually happen in Italy?
Italy has never run out of ICU beds. There have been sporadic and garbled reports of temporary shortages in Lombardy specifically, alleviated by patient transfers and ward conversions, and some of those reports were contradictory (e.g. doctors or mayors saying they were rationing care but other more senior healthcare leaders saying they weren't).
The UK had a hospital that hit capacity temporarily but it only lasted 12 hours before transfers reduced the pressure again.
We'll be seeing a lot of activity like that in the next weeks - reports that hospitals are full, then they stop being full as more capacity is added or patients are rebalanced onto other hospitals. The assumption of total ICU exhaustion seems to have been based on the assumption of uniform case growth everywhere which isn't happening, and perhaps also an inability to quickly add capacity.
The data out of NY that makes me most suspicious of this new model is actually the 72% negative rate on tests. I would expect that to be a lot lower. But that's just a gut feeling.
Edit: I think it is important to keep in mind that Italy's deaths per day are still going up. The growth has slowed and hopefully we are about to see the peak but it still hasn't come. Most western countries are on the same growth rate as Italy, there is no reason right now to think we won't see something similar happen all over the world.
Date Cases New Cases
March 10 9172 1797
March 11 10149 977
March 12 12462 2313
March 13 15113 2651
March 14 17660 2547
March 15 21157 3497
March 16 24747 3590
March 17 27980 3233
March 18 31506 3526
March 19 35713 4207
March 20 41035 5322
March 21 47021 5986
March 22 53578 6557
March 23 59138 5560
March 24 63927 4789
March 25 69176 5249
March 26 74386 5210Hopefully fewer visited the UK and even fewer had close contact with the locals.
A rational person can't possibly believe that this is the cause of their troubles, even if there were such a thing.
Proof: https://www.westernjournal.com/italian-mayor-starts-hug-chin...
citation please.
My understanding is that it's because of the policy intervention that his team advised.
"He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower."
and
"This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said."
So the article says EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU CLAIMED.
This is disinformation.
"New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5."
[0]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...
[...] coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. — more than 1/2 of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case [because] they were so old and sick [...]
The last thing this is about is the Dow.
It's an unpleasant reality, but it's a question of degree--how many lives are worth saving the world economy for everyone else? If your answer is "zero", then why should we not apply that standard to every other disease?
What about the deaths caused by the wrecked economy?
Even putting things in simplistic terms, the 2008 crash is credited with 10,000 suicides. Following the chain of misery into homelessness, stress-induced illnesses, criminality (which leads to loss of life in multiple categories), and so forth leads me to question whether it is actually as black and white as people say it is.
Currently, we're on track to make this economic catastrophe bigger than the 2008 crash. I don't want to imagine what the fallout is going to look like in the future, but I already know a lot of people who are out of work and scared.
Mind you, I'm saying this as someone who has family in the 70+ high-risk category. I'm not oblivious to the value of human life. I am purely speculating about whether or not we're actually doing the right thing, and thinking about the consequences as thoroughly as we should.
And this is a major revision. It drops estimated deaths in the UK from 500,000 to "20,000 or far fewer." It also estimates that the UK will not run out of ICU beds in the process.
The reason is that the transmissibility estimate has gone up, which implies that many more people have already had the virus than we realized. This, in turn, means that a much lower percentage are serious cases. It also means that we are much nearer to the peak than we thought.
Edited to add: He also credits the lockdown in the UK, but if you look at the previous model of how this plays out even with a complete lockdown, you see that the vast majority of the change must come from the change in estimate of transmissibility.