Pres. Trump wants to reopen America and fill the churches on Easter. Working with two epidemiologists, @DFisman and @AshTuite, @stuartathompson and I built an interactive model to show the disaster that would ensue. Try it: nyti.ms/33PWU8u (You, too, Mr. President!)
Instead of stopping by Easter, health experts advise giving social distancing a month to slow the pandemic, buying time to roll out mass testing and equip doctors. Then we can see where we are and think about easing in some places.
"Anyone advising the end of social distancing now needs to fully understand what the country will look like if we do that,” @T_Inglesby told us. “Covid would spread widely, rapidly, terribly, and could kill potentially millions in the year ahead.”
This is not to deny the enormous pain from business closures. At the peak of the Great Depression, US unemployment reached 25%; now the St. Louis Fed predicts it will reach 30%. We have to address those economic losses, and we know how to do so if we have the will.
But when @glennbeck says, "I'd rather die than kill the country," he engages in 2 fallacies. First, the fundamental threat to the economy is not social distancing, but the virus itself. We have to control the virus to revive the economy. Second, he's not the one who would die.
So all this noble talk about sacrificing oneself for the sake of the economy is ridiculous. It's a false choice. It's a red herring. And the people who would die are not the talkers, but the elderly and those with preexisting conditions. Sacrificing other people is NOT noble.
If Trump sends everyone back to work by Easter, says epidemiologist @larrybrilliant, “I think history would judge it an error of epic proportions.” Brilliant urges massive testing and then we may be able to ease curbs in parts of the country with less community spread.
Epidemiologist @DFisman suggests that we may have to tighten controls until ICUs have space, and then we may be able to relax a little, and then tighten again as ICU capacity is again threatened. We may face a year of on-and-off tightening and easing restrictions.
Most news is grim, but a couple of rays of hope: In Italy, new cases have started to drop. And the number of positive test results at University of Washington has stabilized. That's your reassurance that this is a fight worth waging.
Trump pushes for easing social distancing partly based on a misguided comparison with the flu. Experts are clear: This is NOT the flu. This is more contagious, 5 to 20 times more likely to lead to hospitalization, and perhaps 10 times more likely to kill. Don't mess with Covid.
A single person with the flu can result in the infections of 386 other people over two months, and a handful would be hospitalized. In that same period one Covid-19 patient could lead to the infections of 99,000 people, of whom nearly 20,000 might need to be hospitalized.
One lesson of past pandemics is that early “knowledge” is often wrong. But another lesson is the value of responding early and firmly. That's the lesson of St. Louis in 1918 and South Korea in 2020. So don't push a return to normalcy based on hunches or concern for your hotels.
Thanks for your patience; this thread is over. Life is about making difficult decisions in the context of uncertainty, and we hope this model will help you appreciate the trade-offs. Play with it and see the risk of Trump's aim to fill churches on Easter. nyti.ms/33PWU8u
