Not sure. My other comment in the thread got hit with a downvote at basically the same time. If there's a constructive discussion to be had, I'd like to have it. If I got something wrong, I'd like to be corrected. But I'm getting the sense that I somehow hit a nerve with the comment above about the strategy not being to just sit and wait, which is interesting. If theres a way to improve the tone of my communication to not generate some reflexive downvotes I'd also like to know that.

On busy HN topics, you can assume downvotes are just part of the noise and not worry about it. The arrows in the UI are so close together, it’s easy to hit the wrong one by mistake.

(Less charitably, for a busy topic the odds are there’s someone around for whom it happens to be their conspiratorial hobby horse and this manifests as downvotes on anything “mainstream”.)

I think to some of us "flatten the curve" is starting to feel like a March strategy to a May problem. A month ago everyone was concerned about ventilators and hospital beds and as far as I know the USA never hit capacity outside of, possibly, New York City. It's fantastic that we never got there, but now we need to focus on the new problems, which are vastly more complicated. We flattened the curve, but now we're staring down the barrel double digit unemployment, food shortages, businesses and jobs which will never come back, and probably many things we can't even imagine at this point.

The problem with preventative measures is that if they work, people always thing we overreacted. The curve is staying flat because we are staying in lockdown. If we opened the curve, the infection rate would start going up again on its S curve to herd immunity. It'll be worse if we open up and then have to go right back and shut down again. That'll probably hurt the credibility of future efforts to open up if anything, since if someone you know in your community was one of the fatalities after the governemnt said it was safe to open up and the pandemic roared back, why would you trust the government when they say that this time you can actually open up for real?

It seems to be the strategy in the sense smashing a window with a hammer is a strategy to kill a fly. Hospitals are so empty that workers are being furloughed, say nothing about the unused field hospitals and naval ships. The Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table.

Edit: I should add that I didn’t downvote.

Many positions at a hospital aren't related to treating someone with coronavirus. For example, elective and non-time-sensitive surgical departments should have nothing to do right now.

The ICUs aren’t even close to full, and indefinite delays of non-emergency care also has real consequences.

There are only about 7,300 ICU beds in California [1]. If we're at 20%, that's only about two doublings before people start being rejected for care. In March, we were seeing a doubling every few days, with ICU requirements following [2].

I'm not disagreeing that we need to let people be infected if we want to achieve herd immunity, but I think it's a tough choice in deciding which portion of the population you put out to partially die, since letting everyone out at once will result in some high R0 value again, and a vaccine may be on the way. These politicians are in a lose-lose situation here. Anything they do will result in someone being harmed.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida...

[2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-gov-newso...

And people are dying from other causes while we sit and wait.

> Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table.

It already happened in New York. Maybe not quite at exactly the the same scale, but it looked like it was pretty awful just the same.

The scale is kind of the entire point. The logic behind Flatten The Curve is preventing excess deaths that result from a collapsed health care system. Even NY, which was literally sending covid-positive patients back into nursing homes, didn’t get there.

They were doing similar kinds of triage, from what I can tell: https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/were-bringing-covid-19-patient...

NYC has had 12,774 deaths to date, out of 9 million people or so.

Lombardy has had 13,679 deaths with a total population of around 10 million.

So broadly, they're fairly similar, although Lombardy as a region is much larger than NYC.

I was wondering the same thing...

The problem is the public patience is running out and we have not really used the time well.

We didnt overwhelm hospitals, we have contact teaching apps developed, we have a drug that's likely to be approved tonight or tommorow, and we have multiple vaccines in trials. We should have done a far better job early on, especially with testing, but the biopharma sector has risen to the challenge to move faster than basically every before.