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"Do they want to reduce infections or do they want to prevent overwhelming emergency services?"

How do those two policies differ?

Well, I mean, there's the obvious: don't treat people with COVID. But that seems sub-optimal.

Well there are three possibilities 1) Reduce Infections: You try to get infections down to zero. 2) Ignore Infections: Usually used for common cold. People even go to work with it. 3) Limit Infections: You dynamically scale meassures to stay at a defined limit. In this case a number derived from hospital capacity.

"Reduce X" doesn't necessarily mean "I will only be satisfied if X is 0."

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