So when the ICU's are all full, and more people are coming in and a space in the ICU is freed up - who gets the slot? A randomly chosen person? Triage? First come first served? Or someone who can pay extra for VIP access? Because one person will get that space, and the next ten people are going to die in the hallway before the next ICU space opens up.
The reason why it's going to go this way is because we won't have the capacity for everyone who needs critical care. And the reason we won't have the capacity is a) lack of proper investments imagining this scenario, where in Japan and South Korea they have this capacity because they've had this experience and know better; and b) lack of discipline to weld ourselves into our homes or even voluntarily self-quarantine in order to slow things down and effectively give us more critical care capacity.
I spoke to 1/2 dozen people today who are traveling. Three think they have this thing, and have 3 of 3 symptoms. I told them not to travel. They said "Oh well" and are traveling anyway. That's what we're dealing with. A total lack of personal responsibility, upon which both the free market and our democratic government is based - and so far this is about as far as we've come.
The European flights being cancelled, seems sane to me. It's not about 1 or 10 people being sick per plane. It's reasonable to assume after a 6-12 hour flight, that everyone on board is infected if there was even 1 person infected at the start of the flight. I don't know the exact number of incoming European flights per day, I think it's about 80-110K passengers? That's what this stops.
Stopping all domestic travel would be better. Short term pain translates into tens of thousands fewer deaths over the next 3 months. China got a handle on this for now because they welded people in their homes. We aren't doing that which means we haven't slowed it down that much let alone stopped it.
Stopping cargo, if that turns out to be accurate reporting, I think is an overreaction.
The reason why it's going to go this way is because we won't have the capacity for everyone who needs critical care. And the reason we won't have the capacity is a) lack of proper investments imagining this scenario, where in Japan and South Korea they have this capacity because they've had this experience and know better; and b) lack of discipline to weld ourselves into our homes or even voluntarily self-quarantine in order to slow things down and effectively give us more critical care capacity.
I spoke to 1/2 dozen people today who are traveling. Three think they have this thing, and have 3 of 3 symptoms. I told them not to travel. They said "Oh well" and are traveling anyway. That's what we're dealing with. A total lack of personal responsibility, upon which both the free market and our democratic government is based - and so far this is about as far as we've come.
The European flights being cancelled, seems sane to me. It's not about 1 or 10 people being sick per plane. It's reasonable to assume after a 6-12 hour flight, that everyone on board is infected if there was even 1 person infected at the start of the flight. I don't know the exact number of incoming European flights per day, I think it's about 80-110K passengers? That's what this stops.
Stopping all domestic travel would be better. Short term pain translates into tens of thousands fewer deaths over the next 3 months. China got a handle on this for now because they welded people in their homes. We aren't doing that which means we haven't slowed it down that much let alone stopped it.
Stopping cargo, if that turns out to be accurate reporting, I think is an overreaction.