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It seems to be the strategy in the sense smashing a window with a hammer is a strategy to kill a fly. Hospitals are so empty that workers are being furloughed,

It seems to be the strategy in the sense smashing a window with a hammer is a strategy to kill a fly. Hospitals are so empty that workers are being furloughed, say nothing about the unused field hospitals and naval ships. The Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table. Edit: I should add that I didn’t downvote.

nomel 7y ago
Many positions at a hospital aren't related to treating someone with coronavirus. For example, elective and non-time-sensitive surgical departments should have nothing to do right now.
- jdminhbg 7y ago
  The ICUs aren’t even close to full, and indefinite delays of non-emergency care also has real consequences.
  - nomel 7y ago
    There are only about 7,300 ICU beds in California [1]. If we're at 20%, that's only about two doublings before people start being rejected for care. In March, we were seeing a doubling every few days, with ICU requirements following [2]. I'm not disagreeing that we need to let people be infected if we want to achieve herd immunity, but I think it's a tough choice in deciding which portion of the population you put out to partially die, since letting everyone out at once will result in some high R0 value again, and a vaccine may be on the way. These politicians are in a lose-lose situation here. Anything they do will result in someone being harmed. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida... [2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-gov-newsom-says-number-of-patients-in-icus-doubled-overnight/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-gov-newso...
- briandear 7y ago
  And people are dying from other causes while we sit and wait.
davidw 7y ago
> Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table. It already happened in New York. Maybe not quite at exactly the the same scale, but it looked like it was pretty awful just the same.
- jdminhbg 7y ago
  The scale is kind of the entire point. The logic behind Flatten The Curve is preventing excess deaths that result from a collapsed health care system. Even NY, which was literally sending covid-positive patients back into nursing homes, didn’t get there.
  - davidw 7y ago
    They were doing similar kinds of triage, from what I can tell: https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/were-bringing-covid-19-patients-to-hospitals-to-die-nyc-paramedic/ https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/were-bringing-covid-19-patient... NYC has had 12,774 deaths to date, out of 9 million people or so. Lombardy has had 13,679 deaths with a total population of around 10 million. So broadly, they're fairly similar, although Lombardy as a region is much larger than NYC.

nomel 7y ago

Many positions at a hospital aren't related to treating someone with coronavirus. For example, elective and non-time-sensitive surgical departments should have nothing to do right now.

jdminhbg 7y ago
The ICUs aren’t even close to full, and indefinite delays of non-emergency care also has real consequences.
- nomel 7y ago
  There are only about 7,300 ICU beds in California [1]. If we're at 20%, that's only about two doublings before people start being rejected for care. In March, we were seeing a doubling every few days, with ICU requirements following [2]. I'm not disagreeing that we need to let people be infected if we want to achieve herd immunity, but I think it's a tough choice in deciding which portion of the population you put out to partially die, since letting everyone out at once will result in some high R0 value again, and a vaccine may be on the way. These politicians are in a lose-lose situation here. Anything they do will result in someone being harmed. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida... [2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-gov-newsom-says-number-of-patients-in-icus-doubled-overnight/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-gov-newso...
briandear 7y ago
And people are dying from other causes while we sit and wait.

davidw 7y ago

> Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table. It already happened in New York. Maybe not quite at exactly the the same scale, but it looked like it was pretty awful just the same.

jdminhbg 7y ago
The scale is kind of the entire point. The logic behind Flatten The Curve is preventing excess deaths that result from a collapsed health care system. Even NY, which was literally sending covid-positive patients back into nursing homes, didn’t get there.
- davidw 7y ago
  They were doing similar kinds of triage, from what I can tell: https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/were-bringing-covid-19-patients-to-hospitals-to-die-nyc-paramedic/ https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/were-bringing-covid-19-patient... NYC has had 12,774 deaths to date, out of 9 million people or so. Lombardy has had 13,679 deaths with a total population of around 10 million. So broadly, they're fairly similar, although Lombardy as a region is much larger than NYC.