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I've been trying to tell you that, because of that lack of surge capacity, it may be irrelevant whether all the sick cases arrive at once or later. If you have (for simplified example) a capacity of 100 ICU beds max after pulling out the stops, and 80 are on average occupied by non-COVID stuff, you can take care of 20 COVID people at a time. Most of these people need a lot of care before they're ready for discharge even from ICU, but if you're talking about 800 people in the area getting critically ill, the number of lives saved by dragging it out over the course of months is ... not that impressive, especially when you consider the low survival odds of coronavirus vent cases in the first place. Wild guess, you save an extra ten. Weigh that against burnout from prolonged strain, and the fact that all those patients are taking attention away from non-COVID emergencies which accumulate at the normal rate, and you may wind up at a wash or net negative, considering only the curve-flattening itself.
There is the buying time argument, but my experience with our pharmaceutical supply chain is that we really aren't positioned to churn out new therapies in the time frame indicated, even if the bureaucracy gets out of the way. I don't know about the medical devices market, but you need trained staff to run vents, and you can't train people to run vents effectively in the short term. You can get the old RTs out of retirement, but the disease is especially bad to the elderly and there's a PPE shortage so that's scary too. Bottom line, there are a lot of variables in play and it isn't that simple.
(Somebody mentioned Korea. Korea has a civil service and a population with experience in this situation thanks to SARS, and started aggressive testing early and confining the positives instead of shutting everything down. America is not Korea. We burned through public trust and lots of time by first throwing up lots of barriers to independent testing, then told stupid lies about masks. Now we're finally starting to test, but it's going to be rough. Should we have done what Korea did? Yes. Did we? No. The hammer and the dance and everything else seems beside the point. Here's hoping the summer takes this bastard out and medical research surprises me.)
There is the buying time argument, but my experience with our pharmaceutical supply chain is that we really aren't positioned to churn out new therapies in the time frame indicated, even if the bureaucracy gets out of the way. I don't know about the medical devices market, but you need trained staff to run vents, and you can't train people to run vents effectively in the short term. You can get the old RTs out of retirement, but the disease is especially bad to the elderly and there's a PPE shortage so that's scary too. Bottom line, there are a lot of variables in play and it isn't that simple.
(Somebody mentioned Korea. Korea has a civil service and a population with experience in this situation thanks to SARS, and started aggressive testing early and confining the positives instead of shutting everything down. America is not Korea. We burned through public trust and lots of time by first throwing up lots of barriers to independent testing, then told stupid lies about masks. Now we're finally starting to test, but it's going to be rough. Should we have done what Korea did? Yes. Did we? No. The hammer and the dance and everything else seems beside the point. Here's hoping the summer takes this bastard out and medical research surprises me.)
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