I think I’m failing to understand something basic. What exactly is the endgame with this social distancing strategy?

Doesn’t flattening the curve just mean moving the spike to later when you try to ease the mitigation measures?

The responses make me think far few people have looked at the y-axis of the flattening graphs. We’re not talking turning 2x into 0.95x capacity. We’re talking something like 10x to 3x or so. The overwhelming of hospitals cannot be avoided. At best fewer people die waiting.

If the time is not used for cranking out both ventilators and people trained to use them, and developing treatments (not vaccines), we’re just moving spikes around. Ventilators alone is closer to WW1 attrition/trench warfare. We’re pinned down. WW2 maneuver warfare needs drugs.

I don’t think the 6-10 weeks people are thinking about is enough time. But distancing past that will cripple the economy to the point that the ventilator manufactuting and and drug dev fronts will collapse too. Need smart distancing of some sort.

I don’t think any of the best-case endgames people are hoping for is actually likely under current global leadership. I think we’re looking at 10-20m dead globally in the next 2 years.

I’m not sure I get why people are pinning their hopes on test-and-trace. Not only does it take the kind of authoritarian lockdown that is unlikely to be politically enforceable in the west, it doesn’t do much unless you’re making rapid progress towards a drug or vaccine.

Humanists are eager to point out that the economy doesn’t recover if the healthcare war isn’t won. Converse coupling also holds: the healthcare war isn’t winnable in a borked economy. You want to keep mitigation going >12 weeks, create remote-work jobs for 30m people.

tldr: we are in wishful thinking mode.

The best thing we could probably do now is work on smarter mitigation.

This thing might need to go on far longer than the current mitigation can be sustained for. The virus might remain irrational longer than distancing can remain solvent.

I think people are letting trump derangement syndrome blind them to criticality of getting economy running again. Every modern industrial war since the US civil war has been won by a better economic machine overwhelming a worse one. The fighting bought the economy time to win.

Trump wants the right thing for the wrong reasons. He measures his “winning” in stock market and employment figures terms. But the health war is not winnable with a crashed economy. The economy needs to be reoriented towards the war effort in much bigger ways.

Bigger ways than distillers making hand sanitizers and GM making ventilators.

10m people have filed for unemployment in 2 weeks. Their jobs might not be back for months or years or ever. They needs jobs in the war economy.

I hate the war metaphor but it’s the only one we have.

Lemme me put it more simply: the people most willing to crash the economy probably have secure jobs or wealth to tide this out. They have no idea what the precariat is up against after $1200 band-aid and 6 mo support (best case) run out. Probably ~60-80m workers are vulnerable.