Thread by @medicalaxioms

#covid4MDs #math

Stay cool. ❄️❄️❄️
Read to the end.

According to the @JohnsHopkins map, the current COVID infection rates are:

🇮🇹: 1/1,900

🇺🇸: 1/51,000

~ Do not start screaming ~

The US numbers are useless because of our national testing failure.

The Italy numbers are probably more accurate.

Now you will day my math is wrong. You’ve seen the headlines and read the first hand accounts. I must be wrong.

I’ll say my math is good. The data might be bad but my math is good.

So why the discord between numbers and news?

This is not a “national” problem.

Stay cool. ❄️❄️❄️
Stay with me.

This is a single hospital, neighborhood, and town/city problem.

If you read reports from Wuhan, the whole crush is about 2 months long.

The whole pinch at a location is short and local.

Suggestion: We need to stop looking at the country as a whole. Or even making projections for the whole US. Or comparing 🇺🇸 to 🇮🇹.

It’s more like a hurricane than some nationwide disaster.

Why does that matter?

It matters because peaks in different locations within the US may be separated by months. Or even a whole year.

The needs of any one local hospital or town may be vastly different from another.

This is why China was able to move 42,000 healthcare workers from other parts of China to Wuhan.

+++ We are going to need to be able to move PPE, people and equipment to where it is needed. +++

Becuse it will only be needed there for a few months, based on experiences elsewhere.

Hoarding vents and PPE in a place that won’t see a peak for 3-12 months will cause the death toll to rise in systems currently and soon to suffer the pinch.

Treating the entire USA the same is going to “cost” too much.

Maybe not for you, but for a paycheck-to-paycheck person with a service job, they are not going to be able to sit this out until the second peak next winter.

And it’s going to cost science and medicine our credibility.

People all over the US are not going to see these dire predictions come true in their town in a week or maybe even a month.

They are going to doubt us.

They won’t know the things we have done have already flattened the curve. They will just assume it’s more Chicken Little media panic.

So they will go back to work and resume life no matter what the news and “the government” tells them.

Even when we get to the 1/2000 infection rate of Italy, many of the 330M Americans will not know anyone who has died.

Summary: Stop lumping. Stop treating the US as a single homogenous population at risk of COVID.

If we try to move as a whole we will lose. We will have hoarding in places with low rates. Crunches in places with high rates. We won’t be able to move resources to the next place with necessary agility.

We will lose credibility. That’s the worst thing of all. Once we lose that, the surges in each hospital, town or region will be uncontrollable.