Part of me, seeing this "open it back up" movement feels like *expletive deleted*ck it. Let's see how many people we can kill off. Let's see how bad this can get.
I mean, the Spanish Flu only had a 2.5% mortality rate, and the likely adjusted mortality rate for this is only about 1%. 1/100 people is no biggie if I can go to the movies.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait....
I thought this was about "flattening the curve" so the hospitals don't get overwhelmed. Now it's about making sure no one gets the disease?
I thought the plan was that people were going to get the disease, but we want to slow the spread so that too many don't get it at once?
Is it about making sure that most people don't get the disease now? Because that wasn't what was explained to me.
I'll provide anecdata here. My town has two hospitals. There are 150 ICU beds in the larger of the two. (I'll say 50 at the other, but it's probably 100).
The news announced last week that we have 153 active cases in our area... plus 4-5 LARGE surrounding areas. (Which have additional hospitals and ICU beds.) That's total cases in an area with probably a dozen hospitals of varying size.
We have more ICU beds than CASES in this area. And the numbers are trending down now.
IF we think that the virus is gone after the shutdown, I can understand continuing the lockdown. That makes sense.
IF we think the virus will just spread again after we open things up, we need to open things up now to try to actually use the resources we have.
What is going to be better in 2 months while the virus stops spreading if it's going to just spread exponentially again?
I've been operating on the understanding that we don't think we can eradicate the virus by quarantining everyone. I got that from all the talk about "flattening the curve" rather than eradicating the disease.
Have I misunderstood the plan?