If it's already out, how will stopping flights and closing schools really help? How long will you stop them? At best, this will just slow the spread, not stop it.
Each sick person will only, on average in unmitigated conditions, get two or three other people sick. If you consider just a single infected person that doesn't seem that infectious at all. Yet because this is an exponential process that won't slow down until a significant fraction of the population is infected or immune 2-3 is enough to go from a couple people sick to most of the world in fairly short order.
Yet if you can reduce that 2-3 down to 1 or below even with relatively half-assed measures like telling some people to stay in inside, isolating known-infected and likely-infected persons, closing down some major spreading venues, telling people to wash their hands or use surgical masks... presto chango the disease dies out and no more than a tiny percentage of the population will get infected.
If the half-assed measures reduce the exponent but don't get it below 1, eventually most people will still get infected but it will take a lot longer. That extra time means the hospitals get less overloaded and lots of additional lives are saved because many covid19 cases require serious medical intervention (forced respiration). It also potentially creates time for better treatments to be created/discovered.
The best time to start seriously addressing this would have been weeks ago when it became clear that it was spreading from unknown and non-isolateable sources inside the country-- at least to the extent that it could be done without major damage... before there were thousands (likely hundreds of thousands now; given the observed spreading rates) of cases circulating in the US. But so long as the vast majority of the people who could eventually be infected are not yet infected, it's STILL a good idea.
On top of the risk we're facing from hospitals overloading, there is also a lot of potential for widespread panic once testing catches up and the numbers go from a rounding error to "big and scary looking" overnight. Beginning countermeasures earlier should help reduce the panic both by decreasing the peak infected numbers and by making it clear that the issue is being addressed.
https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
Or if you want more math, here's why putting into place extreme measures even one or two days later can make outcomes significantly worse
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
This animation helps understand the concept: https://thespinoff.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Covid-19...
We already know we don’t have enough ventilators or enough staff to care for the ill if we end up with a similar growth curve to what they’ve seen in Italy.
Yes, it will.
One thing that tends to get neglected is that in a lot of diseases, most people don't pass the disease on very well (maybe infect one other person) but a small number of people (superspreaders or superinfectors) pass it on EXTREMELY effectively.
If you can block the superinfectors by quarantines, that is like putting control rods into a nuclear reactor--you slow the progress dramatically.
The problem is there are only so many ICU beds available. If we self-isolate and slow the spread, then we can keep the number of dangerously ill people below our capacity limits, and make sure that everyone who needs care gets it. This is what Japan and South Korea have done. Italy did not react fast enough and now the fatality rate there is approaching 8%(!!).
With very strict measures, we might even stop the epidemic in its tracks. So far, only China is on track for doing that.
I'm usually the doomssayer, but that's 15% of people who are diagnosed. Usually people who are asymptomatic or nearly asymptomatic don't get diagnosed.
Only a few countries have testing programs widespread enough to start estimating case vs infection rates... and certainly not the US, where there are plenty of people who have been obviously infected who are still not included in the official counts because of god-knows-what-the-CDC-is-doing.
What is clear enough is that whatever the rate of serious cases are, it's more than high enough to overload the hospitals-- just as is happening now in Italy. So I fully agree with your point, I just don't want to see if lost in the noise because some people will notice the 15% claim is almost certainly an overestimate.
The difference matters because it's likely that 60-70% of the population or so will eventually be infected. But it won't be 15% of that which need intensive medical care but some lesser number because some infections will be asymptomatic or nearly so.
If you want you can calibrate against the Diamond Princess numbers.
Literally nobody is saying that. Please stop spreading misinformation.
Now under normal circumstances this intervention is not life threatening--that's the smaller "critical" category. But without access to common hospital equipment, the symptoms do become critical. Basically the patient becomes unable to breath normally, and without access to a breathing machine they'll suffocate themselves.
Most "severe" cases are treatable with access to a hospital. But if we peak at once and that equipment is all occupied by other patients... that 15% of severe cases become fatal.
Slowing the spread gives vaccine and antiviral researchers a fighting chance to win the race, gets us to summer where if we’re lucky enough that this virus is seasonal it’ll go away, and, most importantly, “flattens the curve”, as your parent commentator already pointed out.