The best thing we can hope for with COVID-19 is that it's much, much more infectious than we know, writes dwallacewells. That would mean we are closer to the end of the epidemic, and that the virus is much less deadly than we think
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These revisions may be eye-opening, in addition to being encouraging, because as recently as a week or two ago, the projections discussed by most public-health officials were much, much higher. When Donald Trump unveiled his “flatten the curve” chart, months after public-health experts began advocating that approach to the disease, he was working off the IMHE model, and suggesting that between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die.
How long that solidarity and those lockdowns continue is an open, and perhaps unanswerable question — none of us have been through this before, and it’s hard to predict at what point the commitment to collective safety might break, and break to what degree, opening up which share of the population to potentially lethal exposure. But how long our lockdowns last probably isn’t the most operative question when it comes to sorting out and planning for a medium-term COVID-19 future.
So, how big is that denominator number? Unfortunately, we don’t know. Worse, in the U.S., it is at this point, and for the very foreseeable future, unknowable.
On all of these questions, and indeed many others, we are flying mostly blind. But, in the face of a pandemic, we probably need to stop ourselves from deciding to stop flying — as Amitha Kalaichandran argued as far back as February 26 in Scientific American, an argument echoed by Maggie Koerth April 6 in FiveThirtyEight and by Siobhan Roberts in her April 7 essay “Embrace the Uncertainty” in the New York Times.
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