On 22/04/2020 12:11, Amit Varma wrote: > On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 4:28 PM Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> I assume you mean that it is not a good thing to actively work towards. >> This also presumes that teh authorities can affect this outcome one way or >> another. >> > > Well, the idea is to delay and mitigate till a vaccine is ready, while > treatment protocols that will lower mortality also evolve at the same time.
Also, controlling the spread means that the number of people seriously ill at any one time isn't greater than the local health service capacity to give them quality care. One big unknown that's making it hard to say what's right to do - and therefore giving licence to various nutjobs to claim that any given strategy is wrong with great certainty - is that we don't really know how many people are infected. *MAYBE* COVID is highly contagious but not very serious, with only a fraction of people showing anything more than a mild cough, and a tiny fraction getting seriously ill. It's already been spreading for months, and we only noticed it when enough people had it to make a notable number of people properly sick. We've all mainly had it already and we're nearly at herd immunity and all this lockdown stuff is barely necessary as we're unlikely to overrun health services unless we let it get REALLY out of hand; the worldwide confirmed-infected and confirmed-dead-of-covid rate is mainly just rising as more testing rolls out and we've already plateaued, with the lockdowns just flattening out the tail end of the rise to the plateau a bit. *MAYBE* it's actually pretty rare, and the published infection figures from various nations are nearly all the people who have it, because almost all people who have it show enough symptoms to get noticed and tested, and quite a high fraction of them get seriously ill. In which case, we're sitting on a ticking time bomb of it getting out of hand in the population. There's some evidence for the former due to a few random population sampling exercises, but the only way to really know either way is to test as many people as possible. And to avoid bias in the testing, test the population at random, rather than just people who start coughing, as otherwise we won't know how many people are asymptomatic carriers. Test people who died of lung failure, so we know whether to count them or not. > Also, it is impossible in India, except for privileged elites like us, to > separate the vulnerable from the non-vulnerable. So many poor in congested > cities, more co-morbidities than other nations, and a horrendous healthcare > system -- there would have been carnage. (There still might be carnage down > the road.) :-( -- Alaric Snell-Pym (M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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