Once the case count is sufficiently low, we just need R0 to be less than 1. 0.9 is sufficient. That means that each case infects 0.9 people on average. To do that, we're going to need everyone to wear masks, stop having big gatherings, aggressive rapid testing, and electronic and human contact tracing.
The low case count we're going for with the lockdown does two things. First, it stops mass death and hospital overload. Second, with fewer cases, you can actually allocate the manpower to trace all of them thoroughly.
Right -- which is why that isn't a sufficient condition for restoring normal life, where people can go to weddings, concerts, festivals, church services, sporting events, and other large gatherings. To get back to that, we need the virus to be gone, or we need herd immunity. The only way we are going to get there fast is if we fail badly and let tons of people die unnecessarily. The goal is to do it slowly so we can take care of sick people properly.
I don't agree that we can get herd immunity without mass death. First, the fatality rate is still high even with medical care. Second, it would take years to process everyone that needs to get it through proper medical care.
Finally, to do the flatten the curve strategy, you need to get R0 at exactly 1.0. Too high and it blows up again. But if you get it a little too low, and you keep it there for a while, the virus just dies out. If we're capable of keeping R0 at exactly 1.0 for five years, we're certainly capable of keeping it at 0.95 for two years until we have a vaccine.
Consider that it takes days-to-weeks for patient-zero to show symptoms, another couple weeks for symptoms to appear in spreadees, and still more days for the government to responds with strict enforcement. This kind of feedback loop will make this kind of control impossible.
South Korea and Taiwan show that this kind of control is possible.
It is pretty amazing to watch how quick we are at giving the benevolent government a dystopian level of control.
This part of your message does not help. To divide and radicalize people it will just make society weaker and individuals more irrational. For the virus there is no party lines nor nationalism. For the virus we are all together on this.
Social distancing, washing your hands and face masks are effective. And, I hope that next time we will be better prepared for this kind of emergencies. Humanity learns from each challenge.
I didn't expect this issue to become political until I observed it happening. The political aspects of the issue have to be addressed, including the assumption that made-up facts can be benign if they're spoken by the right people with the right intentions.
There seem to be people (on both sides) who care more about "winning" against the political "enemy" than they do about literally keeping people from dying. That frightens me, maybe more than the virus does.
I'd be willing to bet it's more than the actual numbers affected by a virus and an overburdened hospital system.
He started drinking more during the week and has mentioned several times that he is very sad and can't wait for this to be all over. I know that there are thousands of people in the exact same scenario.
Governments can mitigate the problem to a limited extent through temporary measures like giving people money and halting evictions, but that will only help at the margins.
(I said "for most people" because apparently some commenters here think it's fine for people to die as long as they are old.)
In South Korea, people have already shifted to complaining that the government didn't prepare well for online school curricula, because that's what people are worried about now. Their children's education.
That's not necessarily true. Numberphile recently did a piece on "The Coronavirus Curve." It describes "the so-called SIR Model being used to predict the spread of cornavirus."
At https://youtu.be/k6nLfCbAzgo?t=920 (15:20 into the video), they point out that in the model, if the infection rate is reduced hugely, not only does the peak get smaller, but so does the total number of infections.
Another way of looking at it is that they are modeling herd immunity under social distancing, which is achieved at a lower infection rate than herd immunity under normal social behavior.
In other words, shrinking the area under the curve while flattening the curve.
Of course, that's a highly simplified model, might not be true, etc., etc. But it gives me, a leftist, some support for my belief that some "social distancing for as long as it takes" is a more reasonable viewpoint than no social distancing.
(I replaced "strict" with "some" because I prefer the Swedish model - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22768170 . I just haven't a clue for how things will turn out.)
That's too narrow of a view -- it assumes that we can't raise hospital capacity, that supplies shortages are permanent, that treatments won't be developed, that vaccines are vapourware. The point of flattening the curve is to give enough time for those things to be developed such that we can get hospitalization/death rates down and manage a higher rate of infections.
Neither adequate supplies nor hospital capacity would shrink the area. But they would increase the maximum tolerable infection rate. That is, the infection rate that wouldn't overwhelm resources, and increase the death rate.
Given all that, it seems pretty clear that disruptions will last at least a year or two. Perhaps we could move everyone at risk into isolation camps, and let everyone else get infected and recover, hopefully with some lasting immunity. And then perhaps use antiserum from them to help protect the isolated at-risk populations.
However, said isolated at-risk populations would likely be at huge risk of mass die-offs, unless there was substantial compartmentalization. Maybe tent cities?
In short: It's flattening the curve, not shrinking the area under the curve. The better we do it, the longer it will take.
P.S. Since this is inevitably political: in my personal experience the misconception that "the better we do it the sooner we can stop" is being spread by liberal/lefty people who are in favor of strict social distancing for as long as it takes. I think they're trying to rally enthusiasm for compliance, but the fact that this optimistic spin coincides with the political rhetoric from certain conservative ideologues should give them pause. Some politicians are anticipating and subtly fomenting a loss of patience with social distancing, and anything that raises unrealistic expectations plays right into their hands.