bratawurst

You’re describing the opposite of flattening the curve. Closing the gates now does nothing.

I do not mean to be patronizing, but this is literally life or death and the math is very simple.

Today there are k infected people. Tomorrow there will be kn people.

If n is unsustainable, any positive value for k is equivalent. Arbitrarily large changes to k today make an arbitrarily small contribution to the final doubling.

“Infected people streaming in” means k becomes k+c. How much does reducing c flatten the curve? How much does it increase the time span of the critical last few doublings?

It doesn’t. That’s only dependent on n.

Ok, we can’t “flatten” the curve, but we can move the peak, right? How much does reducing c move the peak?

Well, every day we prevent k additional people from entering buys us one day. Remember, tomorrow that’s kn. Act fast.

If we could, this week alone, prevent a quantity of infected Europeans equal to the infected population already within the US from entering, that buys us one single doubling period before the collapse of healthcare. Maybe a week if we got lucky.

I will guesstimate that that is not a realistic target in fact. The actual benefit scales proportionally.

And next week it’s the same work for half the benefit.

What are you talking about.

If healthcare capacity in the US becomes overwhelmed by an exponential function, every moment wasted by officials now, while the numbers are still low enough to do something real about, will turn out to have been a moment responsible for many thousands of needless deaths.

I hope your flippancy turns out to be warranted. I just can’t get there.

No! This will do nothing. How are people on HN asking this? You all know math, right?!

The healthcare system is at risk of being overwhelmed by an exponential function. That means, to a first approximation, nothing matters except the last doubling.

Discussion questions: How does this policy, implemented now, affect the time span of the last doubling of COVID cases in the US? Does it do fuck all? Why, or why not?

This seems not fully worked out. Assuming total travel is constrained, selectively limiting travel to particular areas concentrates travel in the remaining areas, which increases the average number of contacts between travelers, which violates your “reducing exposure to other people is best” rule of thumb.

By your model, some reductions in travel ought to have a negative effect. Is that a fair corollary?

This is insane. I haven’t been really scared of the pandemic yet, but if this is the response, now, I’m terrified.

Changing the number of infected people entering the community does nothing when we already have transmission happening within the community at some fixed rate which is determined by the community.

“Flattening the curve” of an exponential function means changing the rate of growth, not the fucking constant offset.

It’s basic math. Innocent people will die off this incompetence. I’m a little lost for words.

It is the two-thousand-year old word for “road”, and an English preposition.

Anyone who picked it as a trademark for anything knew what they were getting themselves into.