[lug] COVID19

[Davide Del Vento]

Thanks much this is a great read. For those who do not have time or stamina
to read it, here are a few key findings from the report. I'll refrain from
stating my opinion but I think it helps to put things in context that the
death toll for regular pneumonia and regular flu is 200,000 per year and
that cardiovascular diseases (mostly due to eating habits) kills about 1
million a year (and this latter number increases substantially each year).

In the case of COVID-19, it will be at least a 12-18 months before a
vaccine is available. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that initial
vaccines will have high efficacy.

To avoid a rebound in transmission, these policies will need to be
maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available to immunise the pop
ulation–which could be 18 months or more.

In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately
510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the
potential
negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality.

In combination, this intervention strategy is predicted to reduce peak
critical care demand by two-thirds and halve the number of deaths. However,
this “optimal” mitigation scenario would still result in an 8-fold higher
peak demand on critical care beds over and above the available surge capacity
in both GB and the US.

We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy
at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are
needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound.

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 9:52 AM Bucky Carr <bcarr at purgatoire.org> wrote:

>
> For those who like reading such, here is a nice paper from the UK
> where they model various scenarios (with the axes labeled!) and show
> why their opinion is that "epidemic suppression is the best strategy
> at this time."
>
>
> <
> https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
> >
>
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