Independently of your post, I initially planned to start strict isolation on March 18th. After catching up with various news today (esp. the UK government’s estimate that the undetected rate of cases is 2x higher than I estimated it myself), I decided that this feels like pushing it, so I made the resolution to start on March 15th already. And if I was in the US I’d start it even earlier (because of higher uncertainty about the true numbers due to poor testing).My reasoning is driven more by incubation period taking up to 14 days rather than by expecting hospitals to start filling up in the next days already. My sense is that it’ll take a bit longer than you suggest for hospitals to fill up substantially. But either way, I think the incubation period lasting potentially longer than 5 days is an important consideration too, and better safe than sorry.
Independently of your post, I initially planned to start strict isolation on March 18th. After catching up with various news today (esp. the UK government’s estimate that the undetected rate of cases is 2x higher than I estimated it myself), I decided that this feels like pushing it, so I made the resolution to start on March 15th already. And if I was in the US I’d start it even earlier (because of higher uncertainty about the true numbers due to poor testing). My reasoning is driven more by incubation period taking up to 14 days rather than by expecting hospitals to start filling up in the next days already. My sense is that it’ll take a bit longer than you suggest for hospitals to fill up substantially. But either way, I think the incubation period lasting potentially longer than 5 days is an important consideration too, and better safe than sorry.