One region of Italy is close to their ICU beds limit, despite a full lockdown. And they have more beds per person than the UK. Without a full lockdown, won't they run out of beds very quickly, thus increasing the death rate a lot?
The UK plan is effectively to get as many people as possible that are young, and thus at a super low risk of needing hospitalization to get infected, so that they can recover and then be immune, thus making it hard for the virus to sweep through again. If 30% or more of the population were immune, it would be much harder to get a new outbreak started. With a lockdown, either the lockdown suppresses spread, in which case ending the lockdown risks re-igniting the epidemic, or it doesn't, in which case it didn't help materially anyway.
If the UK can get 10x or more of the cases with only the same hospitalization numbers, they'll be in better shape than everywhere else.
The core question ends up being whether they're able to effectively inoculate that many young people without it spreading to just everybody.
Flattening the curve preserves medical capacity somewhat, but it also prolongs the epidemic. And since the lockdowns required to do the flattening have their own cost on lives, it's unclear whether the incremental increase in the number of lives that the medical system can preserve will or will not exceed the number of other lives caught short because the disease and also the lockdowns are extended by the extra time.
You might not be saving lives, just changing which people die.
Or you might save some, or you might lose more. Counting in advance is... let's say nontrivial. Even counting afterward will be hard and full of wide error bars.
It's relatively easy to count how many died directly from an illness, difficult to count how many will die because they delayed necessary non-emergency care for 4 months (unrelated to the virus except for the need to preserve hospital capacity or avoid infection risk) instead of 2 months because the outbreak was prolonged, and virtually impossible to count how many die from things like "I lost my job and my life savings at the same time, and I never fully recovered, and now my whole family is much poorer, which gives us higher all-cause mortality"
Everybody's talking about the first group. Occasionally, I see people admit that the second might exist and be non-empty. But, I keep feeling like I'm the only person on HN (and in my regular life) reminding people that the economy actually affects real life in major ways. (I'm probably not the only one, but still...)
There is only one case that I've been able to find of a person who was diagnosed twice that can't easily be explained away as having been discharged while still infected. And even that case might be one like that.
Current coronavirus has already multiple distinct strains. Even if they don't mutate further, we would need multiple vaccines. They might also mutate to something more deadly, given the COVID-19 is a mutation of the original SARS with some characteristics of HIV and Ebola.
We are in uncharted territory.
I never read about this, can you point me to a source, please?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
The overall hospitalization rate is difficult to know, due to the huge inaccuracies in the case numbers.
The risk is already not that low at 55-65. These are people that are working and thus very likely to catch it.
Unfortunately they don't give a more detailed breakdown.
The only thing that has worked is China/South Korea style careful tracking, rapid and extensive testing and strict quarantine measures. Nothing else so far is working.
But that set of outcomes has risks and costs too.
But regardless, it isn't really clear that the curve-flattening efforts are even effective. Italy is clearly experiencing an utterly uncontrolled outbreak. Despite pretty much the maximum amount of lockdown possible to achieve.
Don't believe that they have only 20k cases, or only 3k new ones today -- even with their increase in testing, they are still strongly test limited; that's why the Italian mortality rate looks so absurdly high -- they still aren't detecting most of the mild cases. (Either that or somehow the Italian version of the virus is about 10x as deadly as the everywhere-else version)
It seems much more likely that the mortality rate everywhere is relatively similar and it is the detection rate that varies. (Notice how all of the places that have really thorough testing all have the lowest -- and similar -- mortality rates? And the places with really high mortality rates are those with known inadequate testing)
Some or the old red zones which covered the starting point of the infection are currently with 0 new detected cases since 3 days so it seems lockdown works IF u put them in place soon enough. [ https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... ]
A lot of the UK infections can be traced to Italian holidays, for example.
Even if the government does plan to lock down the UK eventually, every day must cost 10s of millions, you can understand the strategy to wait longer, and even to play it down a bit.
https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1238604695700209664
(mind the log scale)
Denmark and Norway are less than a week behind Italy in terms of confirmed cases per million inhabitants, as is Switzerland. Spain moved closer the last two days as well.