squillesque

You can approximate one with the other; it used to be common when normals were harder to work with early computers.

Eg, https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/05/18/normal-approximati...

But hospital admission cases depends on perceived hospital resources too... if people think going to the hospital is worse than staying at home, or impossible, that will distort conclusions also.

This story reaffirms my sense that the recent explanation du jour for scarcity, residential vs commercial supply chains, isn't quite right. This person set out to buy an order of 250 lb of flour and it still vanished before their eyes.

My experience with commercial toilet paper has been the same, watching it dry up just like retail. People seem to be stockpiling cheap familiar essentials, plain and simple, wherever they can get it.

The concern I have is the endgame with shelter in place rules. I'm fairly convinced they're working (although not completely so), but what happens when they're lifted? What is the timeline for doing so, and under what conditions? What do you do to prevent the infection crisis from hitting after lifting the rules?

There's already been huge economic impacts, and everyone seems to assume once this is all lifted things will be normal. But without a vaccine or systematic antibody testing, will we just end up delaying the worst of the virus?

My fear is one of two things will happen: either we will have done all this economic slaughter with the lockdowns and still end up with the direct effects of the virus, but delayed, because of lack of herd immunity; or we will do this indefinitely and the economic casualties will increase proportionately.

I'm not saying the lockdowns are or are not the wrong thing to do, but I do feel like doing them without a clear plan for getting out of them is. I also feel like in the absence of these plans, its unfair to compare no-lockdown policies to lockdown policies in current casualties because those places may just be experiencing pains that lockdown locations have temporarily avoided. Places with lockdowns too late may unwittingly be similar.

I can't find the studies at the moment but there's at least one looking at previous pandemics that supports your suggestion. They found that economies that instituted weaker public health responses had bigger casualties from illness directly, and longer times to economic recovery because of bigger losses in personnel etc.

I wonder if lack of public health infrastructure in the us will come to haunt it in the coming months as other countries recover faster and get a head start. That sort of economic opportunity cost from not having more public health infrastructure tends to have been left out of past discussions completely.