I’ve been warning people for months that an extensive quarantine was not only possible, but highly likely.
And the reason it’s highly likely?
It gives time for researchers, epidemiologists, and the government to fight the virus. It’s called #FlatteningTheCurve so the medical system does not become overwhelmed with serious and critical cases.
While the idea of preventing a spike in cases has been around for a long time, someone came up with a catchy title and a better way of explaining it.
Quarantine flattens the curve and also allows the virus to burn itself out.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimates that 38 million Americans will need medical care for COVID-19.
Of that number, as many as 9.6 million will need to be hospitalized and about a third of them – some 3 million – will need ICU-level care.
There are only 100,000 ICU beds in America and 790,000 ordinary beds across the country. Not all of those people will need to be hospitalized at the same time, and experts say the crisis could last up to nine months.
Trevor Bedford has done some calculations that are getting scary. He is a Seattle, Washington scientist studying viruses, evolution and immunity — and has been looking at the gene sequencing of COVID-19 to document the spread. He is saying that by May will be seeing an Italy type of explosion in cases in both the US and Canada.
This is a thread about how to interpret the seemingly sudden appearance of #COVID19 across the much of the US in the past week with some back-of-the-envelop calculations for number of current infections. 1/13 pic.twitter.com/QbzRbRVheS
— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) March 14, 2020
He thinks we are at about 10,000 to 40,000 cases nationally in the USA. But he admits he could be off…
I could easily be off 2-fold in either direction, but my best guess is that we’re currently in the 10,000 to 40,000 range nationally. 11/13
— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) March 14, 2020
No matter what the number is currently, this crisis has just begun and we need to change our behaviors now to #FlattenTheCurve.
But changing our behaviors might not be enough and government officials are slowly coming around to the fact that we may have to quarantine large numbers of the population in order to avoid overwhelming the medical system.
Dr. Anthony FAUCI director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was asked by a reporter if China or Italy style quarantines would occur in the United States. FAUCI said nothing is off the table, so expected to get much much worse…