On second thought, Burr should be required to do community service—at a North Carolina hospital.
“The Imperial College team plugged infection and death rates from China/Korea/Italy into epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation: what happens if the US does absolutely nothing — if we treat COVID-19 like the flu, go about our business, and let the virus take its course?
Here’s what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself.
It gets worse. People with severe COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number available in the US. Nearly 100% of these patients die.
So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans — in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die.
Now, of course countries won’t stand by and do nothing. So the Imperial College team ran the numbers again, this time assuming a “mitigation” strategy: all symptomatic cases in the US in isolation. Families of those cases quarantined. All Americans over 70 social distancing.
This mitigation strategy is what you’ve seen a lot of people talking about when they say we should “flatten the curve”: try to slow the spread of the disease to the people most likely to die from it, to avoid overwhelming hospitals.
And it does flatten the curve — but not nearly enough. The death rate from the disease is cut in half, but it still kills 1.1 million Americans all by itself. The peak need for ventilators falls by two-thirds, but it still exceeds the number of ventilators in the US by 8 times.
That leaves the actual death toll in the US at right around 2 million deaths. The population of Houston. Two Civil Wars. One-third of the Holocaust. Globally, 45 million people die: 7.5 Holocausts, 3/4 of World War II. That’s what happens if we rely on mitigation & common sense.
Finally, the Imperial College team ran the numbers again, assuming a “suppression” strategy: isolate symptomatic cases, quarantine their family members, social distancing for the whole population, all public gatherings/most workplaces shut down, schools and universities close.
Suppression works! The death rate in the US peaks 3 weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit but don’t exceed the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear.
But here’s the catch: if we EVER relax suppression before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before.”
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1239975682643357696.html
Source: @jeremycyoung
Assistant Professor of History @DixieState
. Director, @DSUPolitics
. Author: The Age of Charisma (@CambridgeUP
, 2017).