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Yes, this was what I had in mind when I made this comment.

We would be screwed, IMHO, based on the current mitigation strategies around curve flattening that are not being communicated realistically to the public. The crop of shutdowns over the weekend were billed as 2-3 weeks.. Err, what? How are we even going to know what effect that's having without massive blanket testing? Then, nobody seems to believe anything less than 8 weeks is enough; and that's full-blown lock-down not fractions of half measures.

But as you say, the just spreads it out. So what happens in 8 weeks when we still can't let up the restrictions because if we did that the number of cases would just explode again among the uninfected population? If we aren't turning the corner by June and getting the 40% of adults who can't afford $400 in an emergency back to work..

I'm sympathetic to the UKs strategy and hope the best for them.



> The crop of shutdowns over the weekend were billed as 2-3 weeks.. Err, what?

Exactly. People seem to be mistaking the incubation period (~two weeks) for the length of time the pandemic will last (months at minimum).

It's impossible to have a perfect quarantine, so if we were to all go back to normal after a month, the pandemic growth curve will pick up where it left off. Exiting the lockdown will need to be done super carefully to avoid this outcome.

As far as I can tell, this is probably going to be the new normal until we have a vaccine.


Yup. And the worst-case scenario is infections peaking next winter to coincide with regular 'flu season.

An Imperial College paper [1] out today predicts this under its most stringent suppression scenario; see the chart on page 10.

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...


The 40%/$400 item comes from a fed survey about liquidity. It includes 17% of households with $100,000 in income. It is an outlier, other surveys put it the percentage at 20%.


That's insane, I always assumed it was for much lower household incomes. I consider 100k to be upper middle class in the US.




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