Sad to say, I'm completely unsurprised that countries with rampant Covid19 spread have a lot of deaths in their retirement homes. It's practically deterministic.

People are contagious in the pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic case. So all that's needed is that one employee of the retirement home gets sick and goes to work before they know, and the game is up. Dead patients everywhere.

I'm sure this is discussed and considered on the highest levels of policy in the jurisdictions that have been the most proactive in getting a handle on the epidemic early, and missed in most others.

I'm sure a strict face mask policy could have helped slow things down, but that's sadly been a hotly contested topic.

Many retirement homes here in Czech Republic have had the care takers voluntarily locking themselves up together with the people living there. Some have been there like this for many weeks, only taking in supplies in a safe way & communicating electronically.

Thats some serious dedication & very prudent one, give all the tragic cases elsewhere.

I don’t think the up front deaths are in any way intentional. It’s very hard to compare strategies since there’s many other factors that control the outcome. Like Sweden had school holidays ending with a lot of people coming home from skiing in Italy just when the situation there exploded. And as you mentioned, the virus got into a lot of the nursing homes.

Just for reference, Norway's epidemic also started with a large influx of cases from Italy and Austria. But the countries have used different strategies from that point on.

This is one of the things I wondered when I saw the "flatten the curve" charts and simulations a few weeks ago.

Is there a valid statistical model for letting COVID-19 spread quickly, and "getting it over with", compared to flattening the curve and letting it create fewer mortalities over a longer time?

I suppose even if the total number of mortalities is projected over time, there's real hope that we could find more effective treatments over time.

The problem is that depending on your medical capacity, "getting it over with" overloads your medical system causing even MORE deaths. So the total number of deaths goes way, way up. Because in addition to the deaths from COVID-19, you get extra deaths from hospitals not having beds or able to handle other common injuries/sickness/accidents that are still happening every day but wouldn't normally lead to death because they could get full attention and care.

Now, if we had infinite medical capacity, then actually "getting it over with" could, from a number of deaths perspective, be advantageous. No lockdowns! No economic distress! However, you also overshoot a little. You would have deaths due to more of the population being exposed than required for herd immunity.

Of course, if you're a no lives lost at any cost, you'd still want to reduce deaths by slowing the spread until something like herd immunity or a vaccine. But most don't seem to have that sort of political or economic calculus.

The problem with not getting it over with is that the next wave is at extreme risk of colliding with the peak of the next flu season, which is a really great way of overloading your medical system and causing a bunch of deaths. This is something that's getting a bit of attention in the US now, but (of course) the UK government spotted it fairly early on and was pressured into ignoring it by our idiot press who think that paying attention to anything other countries aren't is a delusion of "British exceptionalism" that needs to be squashed.

I don't think it's a given that there'll be a next flu season. In my jurisdiction, I calculated that we've reduced the incidence of cold/flu symptoms by about an order of magnitude with social distancing measures. (Based on normal incidence of cold/flu symptoms, and rate of covid-19 testing which is open to anyone with cold/flu symptoms.)

Note also that the herculean effort to reduce all other cold/flu viruses by an order of magnitude only reduced R of covid-19 to around 1.

Where can I read more about early identification of this risk by the UK govt?

Not to mention effectively killing your mostly ireplecable medical personell - either directly by massive exposure to the virus, due to overworking or due to psychological issues caused by watching people die every day for weeks on end.

There will be an economic crisis if 2-3% of people lose their lives in a span of a few weeks.

Absolutely there would be.

On the other hand, the results from the recent antibody testing in California[1] (if they're accurate) would suggest a much lower death rate - around 0.1% - 0.2%.

I fully agree that social distancing is the right move with the current data, but I wonder if that will continue to be the case as we come to understand the virus and its actual infection-fatality-rate more.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0

0.1% is the current mortality of flu, this has killed twice the yearly number of flu victims in a month. Could be explained by the huge infection rate possibly but it’s definitely more deadly by a wide margin.

I agree totally. I haven't seemed much informed discussion along these lines, but the only two possabilities I see are:

1) The antibody studies are incorrect, and over-counting the infection rate.

2) COVID-19 spreads much more easily than influenza, and so a large percentage of the population has become infected much quicker than typical influenza spread patterns.

Neither option is great, though to me of the two, #2 seems more hopeful, since assumedly we'd get herd immunity relatively quickly.