If we go with the highest realistic-seeming estimates of contagiousness and (and thus lowest of deadliness), then we can say that what NY and Italy saw was something close to worst-case. One reasoned estimate had 20% of Italians -- and almost 40% of Northern Italians -- infected in a six-week period.
If that estimate is correct, then even if Italy completely unlocked tomorrow, and held mass hug-ins and cough-ins at every gathering place, it still would probably only get back to as bad as it was 3 weeks ago, and probably only stay there for a month or so.
That would be incredibly tragic, but not world endingly so.
On the other hand, if you take the maximal estimate the other way, and say that Italy and NY at the peak were detecting 1/3-1/2 of their cases (it kinda can't be more than that), then there is the potential for outbreaks 5x as bad and 10x as long unless they stay socially distant until there is a vaccine in widepsread use -- and even so, hundreds of thousands more will inevitably die along the way.
Myself, I think the evidence points to higher contagiousness than this, but the difference does actually matter, even if that still outs us beyond the "threshold of ignorability"
That hasn't happened in Sweden.
The problem is that when American employers grant to no sick leave to employees and are brutally against ever doing so, applying the flexible Swedish model to the US would be extremely hard. The model involves mutual trust and responsibility between the state, employers and employees and there's very little trust there in most other countries.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-no-lockdo...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/545241/sweden-enterprise...
There is no known method of stopping the spread of this disease. Even if you flatten the curve, without a vaccine, the area under the curve remains the same.
Fwiw, I'm also in the camp that cases are an order of magnitude off and there is significantly more immunity in the population than we think. However that's a hunch and with out widespread antibody testing it would be irresponsible for anyone to act on such a hunch.
Wow, it is gratifying to see someone able to say this. Absolutely, with some luck there are a bunch of limiting factors (both that there's are harmless infections, that ) that are going to keep the epidemic from reaching the potential it seems to have "on paper". But these are unknown, these are the major unknowns and acting like we can just guestimate them and be safe is supremely irresponsible since if get it wrong, an order of magnitude more people die. A flu season? Ten flu season? A hundred flu season? Do you really want to roll those dice? To a fair extent, we already are but it's not comforting.
The world is full of factories producing a wide variety of things, including biological material. These factories can certainly gear up given time.
What makes you certain that it is possible to manufacture billions of tests?
Not necessarily. The higher the social distancing at the peak, the lower the percentage of infection needed for herd immunity to kick in. Ergo, in effect, lower number of cases. If you drop your R0 by half, your her immunity percentage necessary halves as well!
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
Look under the Mechanics section.
Compare to Denmark (52 deaths per 1m) or Norway (25 deaths per 1M) and Sweden's tactics don't seem to be working that well.
>and Sweden's tactics don't seem to be working that well.
Their healthcare isn't being overwhelmed and that is the only thing that matters in any country at this moment.
Instead it saturates in such ugly ways because it's so contagious (as the comment below this mentions). Thus, highly contagious + entirely virgin population of susceptible people (of all types: asymptomatic, lightly symptomatic, moderately, severely, mortally) will inevitably result in very high infection rates and thus an initial saturation that's also high even if hospital-worthy cases are a small percentage of total known and unknown cases.
This saturation may or may not be capable of getting worse than what we've seen so far in NYC, Northern Italy, Spain and Iran to a lesser extent, but though we don't yet know this for sure, if it is the case, the virus being allowed to spread far and fast will likely cause these bad but possibly tolerable saturations to happen quickly only once, and then simply cease as enough people become immune or at least resistant, and healthcare systems steadily adapt.. So far, it seems that Italy and Spain might actually be close to as bad as it gets even with widespread infection of the population, since credible estimates are presupposing at least 2 million cases in total in Italy at this point, for example. Even in New York there are signs of slowdown already. Again, if that is in fact the worst case scenario in any given region, its cost, as tragic as it is, might be worth weighing against the possibly more catastrophic cost of prolonged quarantine and its resulting economic and social consequences.
We could possibly be delaying an inevitable event with only briefly heavy localized consequences and moderate general clinical consequences by artificially creating a much worse long term problem that kills too, albeit more indirectly and among a wider demographic through missed clinical care appointments of other kinds, depressive suicides, economic ruin, substance abuse and other general population harm factors we can only start guessing at so far.
Hopefully in the next few days/weeks we'll get very concrete data on exactly what percentage of people are/were asymptomatic cases, but my guess is it will not be some crazy high number because if so we'd have likely already figured that out by now.