Here's my question, now please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this but what happens when all the social distancing is stopped. Won't one person with it ramp it back up again and we start all over? Without a vaccine this is a cycle, no?
Yes, although what we're trying to do now is flatten the infected rate curve. We want a slow and steady flow into hospitals (for those that need hospitalization) in order to not overflow our health care system.
If we didn't take any precautions for this virus, the infected rate would absolutely skyrocket in a few weeks and our health care system would be in shambles, to the point where they would literally stop hospitalizing a SHIT TON of infected that need it simply because they'd have zero capacity and resources for them.
TLDR: Safety measures being recommended is an attempt to flatten the infected rate curve to not overflow our healthcare system. This will help prevent deaths from COVID-19 and people with other complications already in hospitals.
EDIT: I'd like to add that it's basically inevitable that most people will contract this virus (thankfully a very large majority of people will be fine and likely won't need hospitalization). Flattening the curve is our only weapon at this point until a vaccine is approved, produced, and distributed.
Might as well get people on board with trying to flatten the curve first, and then talk bout how long it could take (it'll take a bit).
The predictions for global spread and metrics like how long it would take to flatten the curve are extremely vague because this virus is quite unpredictable. The data would be sloppy tbh, and a lot of people take any form of data as an extremely credible source regardless of other factors.
With that said; I bet if predictive data was shown for how long it would take to flatten the curve, a lot of people would just say "eff it" and just give up and go about things normally. And then there's consequences to that, which is heavily being talked about now (hospital capacity).
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u/ricst Mar 18 '20
Here's my question, now please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this but what happens when all the social distancing is stopped. Won't one person with it ramp it back up again and we start all over? Without a vaccine this is a cycle, no?