by Snowball »
03 Apr 2020 11:17
Oh, agreed on lockdown, the curve, a curve, curves, but the crucial thing is keeping the numbers sick at any time below the maximum number the NHS can manage.
It's a horrible set of choices between damaging/collapsing the economy, straining the NHS, "allowing for" extra deaths, triaging = letting old people die, but the idea (mooted by the moron Cummings) of letting people just get it, herd immunity etc was just plain BONKERS.
Those who suggested that forget that most of our so-called "herd immunities" didn't come from letting everybody just get the disease, it came from vaccinations like MMR. Experts (I think it was the WHO said about 3-4 weeks ago that China would have gone to 9 Million Cases (140 times as many as they actually had, but that would then have doubled every 4 days.
We have had measles epidemics, polio epidemics, mumps, cholera, typhoid, the plague. We know how many deaths can occur in a world where there were nothing like as many people, where we weren't so densely packed, where travel was less frequent, slower, and in far smaller numbers.
4-Day Doubling
24-Feb 75,815 WUHAN ONLY CASES
28-Feb 151,630
04-Mar 303,260
09-Mar 606,520
14-Mar 1,213,040
19-Mar 2,426,080
24-Mar 4,852,160
29-Mar 9,704,320
03-Apr 19,408,640 <<<<<
That is China alone would be 19 times what the world is now suffering, the health system would have collapsed weeks ago.
08-Apr 38,817,280
13-Apr 77,634,560
18-Apr 155,269,120
23-Apr 310,538,240
28-Apr 621,076,480
03-May 1,242,152,960
08-May 2,484,305,920
13-May 4,968,611,840... five BILLION, most of the world. That's what "unchecked" does
17-May?
My point is that we have to stop the death toll, whatever it costs economically. We can recover from wars, we have done more than once. We can't recover from being dead.
This will almost certainly change the world, and we will probably be feeling the effects for decades, but we have to slow the virus then stop the virus, or reduce each peak until a virus comes along. (By then it may have muted, but that's another story).
In 1918 politics made governments down-play that virus. That went well.