5/There are some promising medical mitigations under investigation, but none so far that would rise to the level of "treatment." This is a complete craps shoot, and success will likely be years to a decade away. phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/d…
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6/With our current mitigations, we're seeing a doubling of cases every two days in the US (cf. worldometers.info/coronaviru…). We're at about 40,000 cases today. If we can't break that curve, 100% of Americans will be infected by April 17. And about 16 million will die.
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7/That's using the ballpark ~5% from thelancet.com/journals/lanin…. To put that in perspective: this would be equivalent to every single person in Pennsylvania PLUS every single person in Iowa dying.
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8/That leaves mandatory continuous widespread testing of healthy people. We have a single datapoint here, but the results for that one datapoint are at once astonishing and obvious: theguardian.com/commentisfre…
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9/As that article and others point out, the Vò model can't reasonably be replicated everywhere, but it does point to testing being a critical part of this. But as the US can't even test obviously sick people, nothing remotely along these lines will be happening within a few days.
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10/It's important not to have your hopes dashed over and over again. So if you have a governmental order for lock-down expiring in a few days, that's not a light at the end of the tunnel. That's a deadline by which they're going to extend your lockdown.
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11/Because if they don't extend it past then, you're looking at that "16 million dead" number, *PLUS* millions of deaths from all of the heart attack, stroke, and trauma victims who are turned away because the hospitals are over capacity.
4/ We’ve stopped all routine, all ORs have been converted to ITUs and they are now diverting or not treating all other emergencies like trauma or strokes. There are hundreds of pts with severe resp failure and many of them do not have access to anything above a reservoir mask.
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12/This isn't a days- or weeks-long thing. You need to mentally prepare yourself for months of disruption. Counting down the days to the end of of the originally-announced regional lockdown is just going to crush your spirits. Repeatedly.
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13/It's really important to keep your hopes up while we all go through this, and you can't do that if you unrealistically believe that things will be over soon.
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When we get to that point, we'll also likely need to accept that anyone who tests positive doesn't get to quarantine-at-home, but instead heads to a quarantine hotel until they're no longer infectious. (Otherwise there's too much spread within families, etc.)
Mar 22, 2020 · 9:56 PM UTC
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