Thread by @AnnieDuke

[THREAD]
Please read this to get a glimpse of what is coming to the US.

Received this note from a friend in #France who has a child with a fever. I asked if their child was Covid + and this was the reply.

Heartbreaking. Horrifying. Scary. A harbinger of what’s to come. ⬇️ 1/15

There are no tests here! Estimates of how many people have Covid are all over the map (certainly 10x the official number of cases, possibly 100x, nobody has a clue). Even getting a doctor's appointment is out of the question. Hospitals are overflowing.

2/15

Patients are being shipped in specially refitted medical trains from one region to another. My local pharmacy has closed its doors to the public and opened a window in the wall; people queue outside, 6 feet from each other, to get their prescription filled.

3/15

You cannot buy more than one box (12 tablets) of Tylenol at a time; they're concerned about hoarding creating shortages.

4/15

Many friends are sick or have elderly parents who are. The list of celebrities is getting longer, too -- at least three government ministers, some 20 members of parliament (which was an early "cluster"...)

5/15

Political leaders who don't take this seriously will be judged harshly by history (and, sooner, by voters). Even Macron, who was fairly quick to realize the problem and to respond, is now taking a lot of heat for his disastrous decision to proceed as planned...

6/15

....with a national election on March 15th. (He had sounded out the opposition parties, who were adamantly opposed to canceling the election; and he decided that breaking national unity would be even worse.

7/15

The opposition leader said it would be a "coup" if Macron postponed the election; ironically, he now has the virus.)

8/15

The curve is not flattening yet, and it will not for a long while. Lockdown started at noon last Tuesday 9 days ago. The growth in actual new cases should be starting to slow down now, but it does not show:

9/15

... the underreporting of cases is so extreme that the number of confirmed cases is almost only a function of the number of tests performed, which remains low. The number of people hospitalized is growing exponentially, as is the number of deaths (about 250/day now):

10/15

... new hospitalizations are the contaminations of 2 weeks ago; deaths may be contaminations of 2, 3, 4 weeks ago, since people spend 2-3 weeks on ventilators before they improve (or not).

11/15

The logical conclusion is that the hospital system is going to be in a state of complete chaos in about 1 week, with people dying in droves, not only of Covid but of just about any emergency that will go untreated.

12/15

It will be very, very hard to explain that the lockdown is working (which must be the case) when this happens. People are bad at understanding exponentials and terrible at understanding time delays. The combination of the two is a very hard sell.

13/15

It will be an especially hard sell for people who have been locked down in a small flat with their kids for two weeks and who are harassed by the police when they go out. So it may become impossible to enforce the lockdown (it already is in some immigrant neighborhoods).

14/15

Macron has called in the army, officially to bring logistical assistance (of an entirely unspecified nature). It seems clear to me that he is concerned about civil unrest and wants to have them in place in case he needs them.

15/15 [End thread] #COVID19France #Covid19