In the US, even with full lockdown restrictions for several weeks now, the daily death count has hovered at 2,000 for almost two infection cycles (first >2k death day was Apr 7th).
If 'full' lockdown only achieves stabilisation of the death rate, how is easing restrictions, which as far as I can see only rationally relies on the still-shaky evidence from serology studies, what exactly is the plan?
I genuinely ask this in a state of disbelief at the current "end lockdown" narrative circulating in the US. Here in AUS/NZ the Gov didn't fuck around; we locked down, had brutally strict measures for 6 weeks now, and at this point nobody is rushing to re-open (except for a few regional cities that haven't even had cases), while the US has been at 2,000 deaths a day.
As I understand it, there is a bimodal approach to managing an epidemic. You’re on a totally different pathway of successful suppression, where you’ve never actually seen exponential community spread. Your endpoint is not herd immunity.
The US probably was seeing uncontrolled exponential community spread in ~January. There are major metro areas which have 20%+ prevalence. The only endpoint left for the US is herd immunity.
So you would not expect the same measures to be taken, as long as AU is striving to maintain suppression I think that means your local measures will have to remain quite a bit stricter than a country trying to obtain herd immunity as quickly as possible.
EDIT: (Since HN won’t let me reply) You’ve had a total of 6,700 detected cases and 63% of those were imported.
Your total community spread over this entire time was what we see in two days in Massachusetts.
You’ve done 500k tests total, the US is presently running 160k tests a day. Harvard just came out with a study saying they thought we would need to get to 5 million tests a day. This is what I mean by bimodal.
NYC expanded their antibody testing to 7,500 people last week and as of Monday it had come back with a 24.7% positive rate.
> Building on an initial testing run of 3,000, another 4,500 random New Yorkers have been screened since last week for antibodies, which would indicate that their immune system battled the bug, the governor said in his daily Albany press briefing.... Some 24.7-percent of those tested in the city were found to have antibodies, up from 21.2-percent in the first round.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/27/cuomo-says-nearly-25-of-nyc-re...
One aspect that's missed is our testing rate - 500,000+ tests performed so far with a 1.2% positive rate. That's half of South Korea's.
None of this is to blow my Aussie horn. Whilst I'm proud to live in a country that handled this crisis well, I can't help but feel frustration at many of the remarks that Trump has said, particulary comments such as "can you really believe the numbers coming out of these countries?" it's just baffling considering that the AU-US alliance is unshakeable and there is no reason to mistrust our figures.
All stats sourced here: https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavir...
1) Hospitalization rates have been shown to be about an order of magnitude lower than estimates.
2) The most effective treatment is no longer limited by availability of invasive ventilation but rather widely available non-invasive ventilation and frequent repositioning.
3) Hospitals across the country are mostly empty and furloughing workers because their “elective” (e.g. chemo and surgical) wards were all shut down and now everyone is afraid to go to the hospital even when they’re having a cardiac event or a stoke
4) A steady drumbeat of serological studies are showing IFR is lower than estimated, and asymptomatic or mild spread much more prevalent. NYC hospitalization rate is < 2% based on serology.
5) Now that the scale of the economic devastation is becoming clearer and the scale of non-COVID deaths caused by lockdown are coming into focus, a clearer headed calculation can be made about the true immediate trade-offs of a lockdown, to say nothing of long term effects.
I’m personally concerned that we’re going to blow our chance to gain significant widespread immunity during summer months where IFI prevalence is low and vitamin D levels are high. A surge next winter concurrent with a flu spike is the worst case scenario.
We’re also starting to see stress on the food supply chain, or if it wasn’t going to be an issue it probably is now with the latest media coverage enough to provoke some major hoarding of meats / protein in the coming weeks. It’s almost comedic when you can’t buy toilet paper, it’s a different kind of problem when major grocery staples go missing.
These are all important points which weigh on the side of lightening up on restrictions. It’s a spectrum, and right now we are pressing full tilt to lockdown when the actual purported and scientific purpose of lockdown is no longer being served.