Is it winding down? Most of the US seems to be at early days of exponential growth still. Only a handful of countries seem to have things under control and even those places still have restrictions in place.

How are you concluding things are winding down?

It's my own prediction. Check back in a year, by which time SARS-CoV-2 will be just another endemic strain of coronavirus.

But prediction based on what data? I see these types of predictions and I’m trying to understand how they come about.

Let’s check back in a month... Hospitals in New York are just starting to run out of ventilators. Italy who is two weeks ahead of us, appears to have just hit their peak. But they still aren’t slowing down. Very strange prediction.

What is your prediction based on? I really hope we're not still in this in a year. I work in soho in NYC and still have to go and handle stuff at the shop and the city is crazy right now.

“This” is looking more and more like a virus which is extremely contagious but about as deadly as a bad cold. The author of the Imperial College study which led to shutdowns in the UK and US recently revised his estimates and is now saying that the R0 value (a measure of contagiousness) is higher than previously thought, “just over three” is the latest. This would mean that lots of people have already been infected, and it’s not nearly as deadly as everyone thinks.

The flip side is that we’d have a very hard time eradicating it, and if humans can’t acquire permanent immunity it will be around basically forever, like most other cold viruses.

But even if we assume it's no more deadly than a bad flu, doesn't it being novel and hence no immunity at all in the population, give it a much higher impact than the flu?

I mean regardless of the actual CFR and R0 value, we can take a look at Wuhan, Spain, Italy and now increasingly likely NY to see the impact. I'm not an expert but I don't think a bad seasonal flu overwhelms the local hospitals. And this is with extraordinary measures being taken to boost hospital capacity already.

> I don't think a bad seasonal flu overwhelms the local hospitals.

Happens all the time, most recently during the 2017-2018 season in parts of the US: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

Also keep in mind that COVID-19 would be quite a bit more contagious than the flu (so it would spread more rapidly) if this theory is correct.

>It's my own prediction

Based on what. Your gut? Ok Trump.

Look at how fast it's continuing to the spread in the US even with all the drastic measures which have taken place in some areas. If you can't imagine what it would be like without these unprecedented closures then I'm not sure what else to say to you.

I can imagine it, and I'm more afraid of the economic impact than the virus.