I'll be keeping my eye on Virginia now. They just announced a shutdown until June 10th: Virginia Governor Ralph Northam - March
Imagine telling every working (or currently unemployed) body in your state that they're fucked, for 70 days.
There are lots of other questions, all ill-posed in the absence of substantial data, and of little relevance to the immediate response.
Suppose COVID-19 has already infected a substantial amount of the population, and has the same IFR as the flu. We would still need to take drastic measures to stabilize the hospital system over the next 2-3 weeks.
On the other hand, suppose the IFR is 1-2%. We would still need to lift the lockdowns after a few weeks, because the economy cannot continue in any other fashion. Maybe we squat in OV/P100 respirators*, but things have to get back normal.
* I have tried this and do not suggest it.
There are some indicators this community will survive the pandemic.
Cholesterol and COVID-19 — STATIN NATION
Steak and eggs for everyone!
I think maintaining lockdowns for over 2 months is not tenable.
Classic prisoner’s dilemma. If he shuts the state down and it gets really bad, he did all he could. If he shuts the state down and it’s not that bad, it can be spun that it wasn’t bad BECAUSE he shut it down. If he leaves things alone and it’s not that bad, he’ll still get crap for being reckless. If he leaves it alone and it gets bad, he’s directly responsible.
The options clearly favor shutting the state down. This is of course from the position of a politician, and not a leader who makes fact-based decisions that are in the best interest of those he is serving.
To me the most compelling reason given for a total lockdown has been that otherwise the load on the healthcare system would be unmanageable.
But someone compared the total number of COVID hospitalizations to flu hospitalizations of the last several years. The comparison is telling: while COVID hospitalizations are surely increasing, they are nowhere near the peak levels of some previous flu seasons.
Why wasn't the healthcare system burdened back then?
Putting on my self-critical hat...possible reasons, which would be amazing if someone could test/falsify, for why this might be:
1. Displayed in the graph are cumulative hospitalizations, but hospital burden is a function of total daily admits (in other words, cumulative is the integral of daily, over time). Maybe COVID leads to greater daily admissions? As a stupid extreme, just imagine that all 13K patients showing up on the same day...that would be a problem. However, this doesn't square with the 2017-2018 flu season, which has a really steep slope (and current COVID hospitalizations don't appear to be increasing at the same rate; at least at the aggregate national level).
2. COVID requires longer hospital stays, so capacity is reached sooner. For flu, it seems that the average length of stay is around 6 days. I've seen COVID numbers go as high as 11 days (Wuhan data). Could be a reason.
3. COVID cases are more clustered geographically, whereas flu is more spread out. But if this is the case, then targeted lock-downs make more sense than wanting to shut the whole country down.
Yup. For the politicians, there's zero incentive to NOT being draconian -- especially when the masses are clamoring to give up their liberty. This is strong leadership, they say.
To be fair, and mind you, I don't like this piss-ass, liberal, anti gun, governor, the order is less draconian then it sounds. Here's a newspaper highlighting some of it.
Open or closed: How Governor Northam’s stay-at-home order affects you | 8News