We have to transition to this, sooner rather than later. I think the way it works is: the world is flooded in PPE. ER and ICU capacity is doubled globally. The Bergamo proposal is adopted, where most patient care occurs at home or in separate facilities. Wearing masks is mandatory, and establishments provide facilities for disinfection. Social mores adjust. This continues until effective treatment and vaccine are developed.
It obviously takes time to ramp up PPE production, expand hospital capacity, and avert an immediate collapse. The lockdowns serve those purposes, but they remain the most damaging mitigations ever enacted.
Not everybody agrees with your assessment:
https://theinfectiousmyth.com/book/CoronavirusPanic.pdf
In the absence of actually knowing for sure what the hell is going on with this virus, Anthony Fauci said recently that the quarantine/"social distancing" measures should remain in effect until there were no new cases, no deaths. This is a satisfying academic position, but the man is a fool for saying it, and respect for his expertise comes with a very high price.A group of doctors in Marseille, France, working in a very experienced lab, that regularly does testing for respiratory viruses, reported testing 4,084 samples for the novel coronavirus, using several systems approved for use in Europe, without a single positive [25]. This included 337 people returning from China who were tested twice, and 32 people referred because of suspected coronavirus infection. It is statistically improbable that this lab was just lucky to not get any coronavirus cases, it is more likely that they used more stringent criteria, illustrating that the performance of not just test kits, but labs, with this new test, is completely unknown. Yet, a positive test remains unquestioned in every case.
You can't have a functioning economy if you're not allowed to. The rest of the country is not NYC, and we are being treated as if we were. And I'm not saying you have anything to gain -- several of us have speculated that you don't have anything to lose, and that seems to be the case. We do, so our calculus is different than yours. You apparently don't realize that the damage to the economy is already so profound that it will take years to recover, if it ever does, but you think that the imminent loss of 1% of the US population is a credible enough prospect to sacrifice the livelihoods of tens of millions more than that, and the geometric growth of the power of governments at all levels is an acceptable side effect of whatever is necessary to avert your doomsday scenario. I'm tired of this too. We'll see who's right in a month.
Iodine it seems, usually sold as 'Isojin'..
Active ingredient Povidone-Iodine. "It has antiseptic properties that kills harmful micro organisms such as bacteria, virus and fungi within the throat and mouth."
Probably does naff all against viruses.
To gargle or not to gargle? | The Japan Times
The data out of iceland is interesting, indicating that 50 percent of positive cases are asymptomatic.
In Iceland, free coronavirus tests reveal 50% of cases show no symptoms | National Post
This is promising news, but what we desperately need to start doing is figuring out how many asymptomatic people are positive.
This is what Peter Attia is calling for here:
YouTube
It's tempting to look at data from Iceland and make the incorrect inference that 50 percent of asymptomatic people are actually carrying the virus (this would be great news, as it would imply that the case fatality risk is much smaller than expected, assuming most people in the population are asymptomatic).
But you have to do the proper test.
Suppose, for example, that only 5 percent of asymptomatic people are infected (bad news for CFR).
Also suppose that 70 percent of symptomatic people are infected.
Now suppose that asymptomatic people comprise 80 percent of the population, and symptomatic people comprise the remaining 20%.
Then, if you were to randomly test 100 people from the population, you'd expect 80 people to be asymptomatic, and 20 people to be symptomatic.
You'd thus expect 4 asymptomatic people to test positive, and 15 symptomatic people to test positive.
You'd then conclude (rightly) that 4/19 = ~20% of positive cases are asymptomatic.
But you'd be wrong to conclude that 20 percent of asymptomatic people are carriers (the correct percentage is 5%).
That's why you need to directly test (preferably randomly) asymptomatic people and get the figures (and test the same folks twice separated by 5-7 days). If it turns out that a huge chunk of them test positive (either for antibodies, or for the virus itself, and ignoring the issue of PCR vs culture testing), and if a large chunk of your population is asymptomatic, you can infer that a large chunk of your population has already been infected. And if this the case, this means two things:
1) The CFR is low in your community (assuming you haven't been inundated with a huge number of deaths). The fact that these folks tested positive while remaining asymptomatic for 5-7 days means that they're very unlikely to go on to get worse, let alone die.
2) You're likely already past the exponential phase of growth, which means that social distancing isn't as critical.
Take home point is that this sort of strategic testing of asymptomatic people might allow many communities to relax social distancing with low risk.
COVID-19: Attacks the 1-Beta Chain of Hemoglobin and Captures the Porphyrin to Inhibit Human Heme Metabolism
Have to wonder if this might explain some of the early reports that certain blood types were far more likely to survive. Also might explain some of the anecdotal reports of people who engage in intense aerobic exercise getting especially sick, and of patients suddenly going hypoxic in the waiting room.
A clarification:
Doctors are compelled to take the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm”.
A question to all doctors who advocate the current COVID-19 government lockdown measures:
Are there any models which forecast the effect that these COVID-19 government lockdown measures will have on suicide rates?
The World Health Organisation states that
suicide accounted for 1.4% of all deaths worldwide, making it the 18th leading cause of death in 2016.
WHO | Suicide data