An observation on “hammer and the dance” and “flattening the curve” and so on:
Across the world as a whole for the last month, growth in confirmed COVID cases is approximately linear, and we have some reason to suspect that this is a true reduction in disease burden growth instead of just an artifact of limited testing and so on. This is roughly what you’d expect if R0 is close to 1 and serial intervals is about a week. Some places, like Czechia and Switzerland, have sustained reductions that correspond to a R0 substantially below 1.
If you have R0 of 1 for about as long as the course of the disease, you enter steady state, where new people are infected at the same rate at which infected people recover. This is the ‘flattening the curve’ world, where it still hits almost everyone, but if your hospital burden was sustainable it stays sustainable (and if it’s unsustainable, it remains unsustainable).
If you look just at confirmed cases, about 0.3% of the US was infected over the last month; this is actually slow enough that you have a long time to develop significant treatments or vaccines, since it takes decades at this rate to infect everyone.
But it seems important to acknowledge that the choices we have (unless we develop better anti-spread measures) are “increase the number of active cases” (by relaxing measures) and “keep the number of active cases the same,” (by maintaining measures) not “reduce the number of active cases” (by maintaining measures). This makes it hard to recover if you open up and the number of active cases becomes unmanageable.
An observation on “hammer and the dance” and “flattening the curve” and so on:
Across the world as a whole for the last month, growth in confirmed COVID cases is approximately linear, and we have some reason to suspect that this is a true reduction in disease burden growth instead of just an artifact of limited testing and so on. This is roughly what you’d expect if R0 is close to 1 and serial intervals is about a week. Some places, like Czechia and Switzerland, have sustained reductions that correspond to a R0 substantially below 1.
If you have R0 of 1 for about as long as the course of the disease, you enter steady state, where new people are infected at the same rate at which infected people recover. This is the ‘flattening the curve’ world, where it still hits almost everyone, but if your hospital burden was sustainable it stays sustainable (and if it’s unsustainable, it remains unsustainable).
If you look just at confirmed cases, about 0.3% of the US was infected over the last month; this is actually slow enough that you have a long time to develop significant treatments or vaccines, since it takes decades at this rate to infect everyone.
But it seems important to acknowledge that the choices we have (unless we develop better anti-spread measures) are “increase the number of active cases” (by relaxing measures) and “keep the number of active cases the same,” (by maintaining measures) not “reduce the number of active cases” (by maintaining measures). This makes it hard to recover if you open up and the number of active cases becomes unmanageable.