Coronavirus: Why This is More World War II Than Flu

tl;dr: Projecting how things go if we reopen the country, if we go on about our days like we normally do (like nothing is threatening us), then 2.2+ million Americans could die in the next 6 months or so. If drastic steps are taken (as they seem to be partly being taken in many places) then the death toll instead is much lower, in the thousands.

Two main paths to take, one is we take extraordinary steps to slow down the spread of the virus that causes the disease named Covid-19 (a novel coronavirus), and the other is we don’t. If we slow the spread, then hospitals and the health care system can treat people as they get sick and make them well. If we don’t, then too many people get sick at once to help them all at once, and someone you know dies, possibly 3–8 people you know.

If hospitals get overwhelmed, then they’d have to choose who to give life saving treatment to. Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds are not just a normal bed with a heart monitor nearby. There are only 97,776 ICU beds in the US according to the American Hospital Association. It is estimated by some (source PDF at the end of this article) that “81% of… the US population would be infected over the course of the epidemic.” About 265 million Americans may catch Covid-19 during this. Let’s pretend that prediction is high, even twice as high as it should be and that only 40% get infected, that’s 133 million Americans infected.

…based on 40 percent prevalence of COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic, we estimate that 98,876,254 individuals will be infected, 20,598,725 individuals will likely require hospitalization and 4,430,245 individuals will need ICU-level care…

(emphasis added by me, from American Hospital Capacity And Projected Need for COVID-19 Patient Care).

If about 3% of people who get Covid-19 need an ICU bed, that’s 4,430,245 people. 4,430,245 people needing 97,776 ICU beds can’t use them all at once. We need to slow down the rate it spreads, so there is an ICU bed available for everyone who needs one when they need it. We need to flatten the curve:

USA Today writes today that “Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte called the month-long outbreak Italy’s worst crisis since World War II, and it is hard to disagree,” and goes on to say doctors there are now, “forced to make decisions usually reserved for wartime triage tents: deciding who lives or dies when the number of respirators is outnumbered by the patients who need them. Morgues are running out of space to hold corpses” (emphasis added by me).

The United States may be following that trajectory if we don’t flatten the curve. Partly, this is because things like respirators, ICU beds, healthy trained staff and protective equipment (PPE) for medical personnel are not limitless. 2,629 health workers in Italy have been infected by the novel coronavirus so far and, at the end of last week, one hospital alone in Italy had 460 of its own nurses at home, self-quarantining with Covid-19. ICU beds without staff to attend to the patients in them can’t save lives.

On top of that 2.2 million US dead predicted if we reopen the country (do nothing/go back to normal) are a large number of possible deaths when people just can’t get a hospital bed when they have car accidents and other health issues.

How You Can Help:

If you have any masks, even masks for construction work, please donate them to hospitals. The Surgeon General says you don’t need them at home or outside, but they are needed urgently to protect our health-care workers’ safety. No hospital works well with its staff not healthy and able to work. The life they save, by being at work, could be yours.

• Wash your hands.
• If you must leave home, practice social distancing: keep at least 6 feet from other people.
• Wear a DIY mask when you go out (not medical grade, give those to medical staff)
• Stay home. You can even get a mug I made to keep you company, or a throw blanket to curl up in:

Stay home. If we pull this off right, it will seem like it was all an overreaction. If not, people you know may die.

(Source mentioned above is this PDF, pages 6–8 are particularly clarifying: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand.)