I suppose it will be too late, but one way to test the “flatten the curve” idea is to note how many countries go to saturated populations while still keeping the need for ICU/ventilators always within capacity. The advertised claim for FTC was that it would allow everyone who needed treatment to get it.
That is how many countries do not overload capacity, while not crushing the virus.
My claim is that no-one will achieve this. That is they will either crush the virus (CCP China ex Wuhan etc, Taiwan) or have a blowout (North Italy).
I spent several days modeling this and regardless of how complex the models, the window to achieve this is very narrow. Models done by experienced professionals produce much the same result.
The intuition is that exponential growth either blows up or collapses. The zone where it grows very slowly is narrow (typically 1<R0<1.08). This happens even when you take into account the fact that fractions of the population become immune over time and so the growth rate slows as you approach saturation.
It is true that reducing the raw R0 (based on pristine population) does reduce the total number infected, because the effective R0 falls under 1.0 sooner and the virus dies out. But this is still in a world where there are huge capacity overloads.
Are you accounting for efforts to increase critical care capacity? Most Western governments seem to be acknowledging that cases will blow up, and the only question is whether we can get enough ventilators in time for the peak.
I suppose it will be too late, but one way to test the “flatten the curve” idea is to note how many countries go to saturated populations while still keeping the need for ICU/ventilators always within capacity. The advertised claim for FTC was that it would allow everyone who needed treatment to get it.
That is how many countries do not overload capacity, while not crushing the virus.
My claim is that no-one will achieve this. That is they will either crush the virus (CCP China ex Wuhan etc, Taiwan) or have a blowout (North Italy).
I spent several days modeling this and regardless of how complex the models, the window to achieve this is very narrow. Models done by experienced professionals produce much the same result.
The intuition is that exponential growth either blows up or collapses. The zone where it grows very slowly is narrow (typically 1<R0<1.08). This happens even when you take into account the fact that fractions of the population become immune over time and so the growth rate slows as you approach saturation.
It is true that reducing the raw R0 (based on pristine population) does reduce the total number infected, because the effective R0 falls under 1.0 sooner and the virus dies out. But this is still in a world where there are huge capacity overloads.
Are you accounting for efforts to increase critical care capacity? Most Western governments seem to be acknowledging that cases will blow up, and the only question is whether we can get enough ventilators in time for the peak.