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4/16/20, “U.S. ducks coronavirus doomsday as projections miss mark,” Washington Times, Stephen Dinan,
“New York, which just weeks ago was pleading with the feds to help it find 40,000 ventilators to handle a projected flood of critically ill COVID-19 patients, now says things are going so well it’s shipping hundreds of ventilators to other states.
Hospital beds nationwide were projected to top out at nearly 225,000 on their peak day amid the coronavirus crisis. Instead, they peaked at less than a third of that.
Beds in intensive care units are also far less in demand than prognosticators had warned.
It’s all good news, as America appears to be avoiding doomsday coronavirus scenarios, but it’s spurring questions about why the initial numbers were so far off….[Fine, when will the $2.2 trillion taken from us based on “far off” data be returned?]
Prognosticators and policymakers were operating in the dark, guessing at what was going to happen and using imperfect data to make decisions that could turn out to have been completely wrong….
Even when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was demanding tens of thousands of ventilators for his state alone, the models said the entire country would need no more than about 25,000 at peak.
In reality, things topped out at a peak last week of about 15,000 ventilators nationally, with New York needing only about 5,200.
Things have improved so rapidly that Mr. Cuomo said this week New York is sending 100 of its ventilators to Michigan, 50 to Maryland and 100 to New Jersey.
The governor said models that had projected a significantly more dire situation and greater need for such vital equipment at the peak of the crisis had assumed higher rates of spread.
“If their rate of spread actually happened, we would [have] been in a much, much worse situation,” he said. “We slowed the infection by our actions and that’s why we’re in a better position today.”
There are several different models, but the one the White House had been using, from the [largely Bill Gates funded] Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, predicted in late March a nationwide peak demand of nearly 225,000 hospital beds for COVID-19 patients.
By last week that projection had been cut to 140,000 beds. In reality, fewer than 60,000 were being used for COVID-19 patients at the peak, the IHME [Gates] now says. The model showed a similar trajectory for ICU beds and ventilators.
Total deaths, which had been projected to reach nearly 82,000 by August, are now projected at fewer than 70,000 in IHME’s latest data, which assumes full social distancing measures will last through May.
IHME didn’t respond to inquiries from The Washington Times. The success stories are playing out in states across the country.
South Dakota says it’s gone from a projected peak of 10,000 hospital beds to just 2,500.
IHME says Oregon has yet to hit its peak,but it’s on pace for just half of the 500 deaths projected a couple of weeks ago.
The governor there was so satisfied that last week she ordered the 140 ventilators the Federal Emergency Management Agency had earmarked for her state to go instead to New York. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee returned 400 of the 500 ventilators FEMA sent his state.
The national stockpile, which was down to about 6,900 ventilators on Sunday, was back up to more than 8,700 on Wednesday, according to FEMA numbers.
Dr. Anand Parekh, a former deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Health Department and now chief medical advisor at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the drop in demand for ventilators is likely due [meaning he’s guessing, not stating published peer reviewed results] to social distancing managing to flatten the curve, reducing the peak need for intensive care and medical equipment….
Models are only as good as their inputs, and Kevin Pham, a medical doctor and former graduate fellow for health policy at the Heritage Foundation, said models were initially built off of what researchers knew about COVID-19 from other countries such as Italy and China.”…
[Ed. note: “There’s really no option but follow in China’s footsteps and suppress.”...This is what the Queen’s subject said and Trump accepted. He agreed with Communist China and UK computer models predicting 2.2 million US deaths and that “no option” existed except radical lockdown including school closings for many months, possibly 18 months….NY Times, 3/16/20: “[Imperial College mathematical biologist] Dr. Ferguson has been candid that the report reached new conclusions because of the latest data from Italy, which has seen a spiraling rate of infections, swamping hospitals….“The U.K. has struggled...about how to handle this outbreak long term,” Dr. Ferguson said in an interview on Monday, just after the report was released. “Based on our estimates and other teams’, there’s really no option but follow in China’s footsteps and suppress.””…3/17/20, “Behind the Virus Report That Jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to Action,” NY Times, Mark Landler, Stephen Castle…"American officials said the report, which projected up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States from such a spread, also influenced the White House to strengthen its measures to isolate members of the public.…With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a [mathematical biologist] prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.”]
Now that U.S. data has been added in, models such as the IHME show a very different picture.
“The models were off by a fairly spectacular margin in this case, but we can only work with what we know, and at the time these models were first created, what we knew mostly came from the hardest-hit places in the world,” Dr. Pham said.
Policymakers may have intuitively known that projections of 2 million dead Americans were unlikely but “they had to choose between a gut intuition and a mathematically derived projection.”
It’s not surprising they went on the high end. [Not a problem. Simply cancel the $2.2 million bill they passed too quickly based on “the high end”].
“You can be forgiven for overestimating need but not for guessing low,” Dr. Pham said.
Yotam Ophir, a professor at the University of Buffalo, said the problems with modeling aren’t unique to epidemiology. He compared it to weather forecasting, which is also based on likelihoods and past performance.
Just as people struggle with how to act in a forecast with a 40% chance of rain, so policymakers are making major decisions while grappling with large confidence intervals, based on the factors Dr. Pham identified. [Not a problem. Simply cancel the “major decision” to steal $2.2 trillion of “the folks” money].
“Models always include uncertainty and can never predict the exact numbers, and models are also changing with circumstances,” Mr. Ophir said. [Fine, so just return the $2.2 trillion of our money].
Some analysts say the problem isn’t with the models but rather the policymakers — and average Americans — who are looking to them for guidance, without understanding the limits of the data. [Right, it’s “the folks'” fault for not “understanding” that even though the models were erroneous we’d still have to pay $2.2 trillion]
The biggest danger may be that folks get complacent too quickly, ignoring the models that suggest an echo-boom of COVID-19 infections later,”…
[Ed. note: You just said we “folks” were too stupid to understand “limits of the data,“ now you say we should believe “models” suggesting “echo boom?” Of course, trillions more will be needed for that “suggestion.”]
(continuing): “social distancing is relaxed too far or too fast, and if a strong testing, tracking and isolation regime isn’t in place.
Dr. Parekh said [failed, so-called] policymakers [who’ve predicted the exact opposite so far and haven’t offered to return the $2.2 trillion it stole from the “folks”] need to plan for a rebound of cases.
“I think it’s critical that we continue the manufacturing and stockpiling of ventilators given that this is still the [alleged] first wave of the pandemic and we don’t quite know what [if anything] might come next,” he said.”
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Among comments:
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“Anyone with even 5 upper level research method and analytical coursework classes KNEW exactly how this was going to play out and the model moguls were idiots or deliberately trying to play the President and the country. AND NY is now trying to totally SKEW the numbers by trying to put cause of death as virus deaths WITHOUT ONE TEST DONE TO VERIFY. So hey some old person that has emphysema for years dies due to being unable to breathe, and it’s possible it might be stated on their death certif that the probable cause was the VIRUS and not chronic emphysema!...Sick crap going on now and it’s more terrifying than the virus itself.“...BlueStrawberry
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Added: “There’s really no option but follow in [Communist] China’s footsteps and suppress,” said Neil Ferguson, leader of virus report by UK’s Imperial College which is considered the “gold standard,” per NY Times…In the UK, “All non-urgent [NHS] operations in England will be postponed for at least three months, starting April 15, to free up 30,000 beds to help tackle the coronavirus."
3/17/20, “Behind the Virus Report That Jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to Action," NY Times, Mark Landler, Stephen Castle
“When Boris Johnson was campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016 — a path that many experts warned would end in disaster for the country — one of his close allies, Michael Gove, famously declared that “people in this country have had enough of experts.”
Now, Mr. Gove and Mr. Johnson are leading the British government as it confronts the calamity of the coronavirus, and Mr. Johnson, now the prime minister, insists the process is being guided by experts. The trouble is, those experts can often disagree with each other or change their minds about the right course of action.
That messy back-and-forth has been on vivid display this week with the publication of a startling new report on the virus from a team at Imperial College in London. The report, which warned that an uncontrolled spread of the disease could cause as many as 510,000 deaths in Britain, triggered a sudden shift in the government’s comparatively relaxed response to the virus.
American officials said the report, which projected up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States from such a spread, also influenced the White House to strengthen its measures to isolate members of the public.
But outside experts pointed out that the report’s alarming conclusions — that the virus would overwhelm hospitals and that governments had no choice but to impose radical lockdown policies — had been made in previous reports on coronavirus or on social media sites devoted to the outbreak.
“A lot of it is not what they say, but who says it,” said Devi Sridhar, director of the global health governance program at Edinburgh University. “Neil Ferguson has a huge amount of influence.”
Imperial College, experts noted, was part of the advisory group for the government’s now-abandoned strategy, which played down radical social distancing and accepted that the infection would spread through the population. The theory is that this would build up so-called “herd immunity,” so that the public would be more resistant in the face of a second wave of infections next winter.
But such a strategy, the report noted, would lead to a flood of critically ill patients in a country without enough beds. Instead, it said, Britain needs to pursue “suppression,” which involves far stricter lockdowns, like the closing of schools and the quarantine of infected people and their families. That would drive down the number of cases and spread out the flow of patients over a longer period, allowing hospitals to cope.
Dr. Ferguson has been candid that the report reached new conclusions because of the latest data from Italy,
which has seen a spiraling rate of infections, swamping hospitals and
forcing doctors to make agonizing decisions about who to treat.
“The U.K. has struggled in the past few weeks in thinking about how to handle this outbreak long term,” Dr. Ferguson said in an interview on Monday, just after the report was released. “Based on our estimates and other teams’, there’s really no option but follow in China’s footsteps and suppress.”
The report added, “this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK.”
But other experts said the burden on hospitals was clear as far back as the original outbreak in Wuhan, China. Lancet, the British medical journal, published an article in January, based on studying a small group of patients, which found that a third of people had to be admitted to intensive care units.
“I can’t help but feel angry that it has taken almost two months for politicians and even ‘experts’ to understand the scale of the danger from SARS-CoV-2,” said Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of Lancet, on Twitter.“ Those dangers were clear from the very beginning.”
Some said governments should treat the report’s projections about suppression policies with the same caution. It says social distancing measures might have to be imposed for 18 months or more, at least intermittently, until a vaccine is developed and tested. But the report acknowledges this is uncertain, given the possibility of drug treatments and the mystery of how the virus is transmitted.
“We’re all using the 1918 pandemic flu handbook,” Dr. Sridhar said. “But we’re in a different position than in 1918. We’re in 2020.”
After days of confusion about the wisdom of encouraging “herd immunity,”
the government sought to play down the dispute, arguing that this was
not a deliberate part of its strategy but a byproduct of it. But it shifted to a policy of urging people not to go to pubs, restaurants, theaters or museums.
On Tuesday, the [UK] government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said he expected these new, more stringent restrictions to last for months— and that the authorities would have to monitor very carefully what would happen when they are eventually lifted.
British officials recognize that their health service faces a moment of truth. All non-urgent operations in England will be postponed for at least three months, starting April 15, to free up 30,000 beds to help tackle the coronavirus.
Britain lags behind other European nations in its supply of ventilators.
Plans are underway to ramp up their numbers from over 8,000 to 12,000,
though officials are reluctant to promise that even this is sufficient.
Underscoring the change in tone, Britain’s finance chief, Rishi Sunak, announced a gargantuan fiscal stimulus to salvage reeling British businesses and to try to stem job losses. The
package, worth £330 billion, or $422 billion, will include
government-backed loans and tax breaks for companies and a three-month
break in mortgage repayments for strapped homeowners.
“We have never in peacetime faced an economic fight like this,” said Mr. Sunak, who also promised support for airports and airlines in the coming days, after Britons were advised against all non-essential travel.
Mr. [Prime Minister] Johnson hinted on Tuesday that schools could be closed soon.”…
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Added: More from Imperial College “researchers” led by British subject Neil Ferguson who advised: “There’s really no option but follow in China’s footsteps and suppress.” “Researchers” add that events in China and South Korea in coming weeks will help inform UK lockdown strategy further:
March 17, 2020, “COVID-19: Imperial researchers model likely impact of public health measures,” UK Imperial College, by Dr. Sabine L. van Elsland, Ryan O'Hare
“Researchers from Imperial have analysed the likely impact of multiple public health measures on slowing and suppressing the spread of coronavirus.
The latest analysis comes from a team modelling the spread and impact COVID-19 and whose data are informing current UK government policy on the pandemic.
The findings are published in the 9th report from the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling within the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, J-IDEA, Imperial College London.
Professor Neil Ferguson, head of the MRC GIDA team and director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA), said: “The world is facing the most serious public health crisis in generations. Here we provide concrete estimates of the scale of the threat countries now face.
“We use the latest estimates of severity to show that policy strategies which aim to mitigate the epidemic might halve deaths and reduce peak healthcare demand by two-thirds, but that this will not be enough to prevent health systems being overwhelmed. More intensive, and socially disruptive interventions will therefore be required to suppress transmission to low levels. It is likely such measures – most notably, large scale social distancing – will need to be in place for many months, perhaps until a vaccine becomes available [of course there’s no guarantee a suitable vaccine will ever “become available”].”
Combining multiple measures
In the current absence of vaccines and effective drug treatments [with the exception of hydroxyquinalone cocktails which continue to show success], there are several public health measures countries can take to help slow the spread of the COVID-19. The team focused on the impact of five such measures, alone and in combination:
*Home isolation of cases – whereby those with symptoms of the disease (cough and/or fever) remain at home for 7 days following the onset of symptoms *Home quarantine – whereby all household members of those with symptoms of the disease remain at home for 14 days following the onset of symptoms
*Social distancing – a broad policy that aims to reduce overall contacts that people make outside the household, school or workplace by three-quarters.
*Social distancing of those over 70 years – as for social distancing but just for those over 70 years of age who are at highest risk of severe disease
*Closure of schools and universities
Modelling available data, the team found that depending on the intensity of the interventions, combinations would result in one of two scenarios.
In the first scenario, they show that interventions could slow down the spread of the infection but would not completely interrupt its spread. They found this would reduce the demand on the healthcare system while protecting those most at risk of severe disease. Such epidemics are predicted to peak over a three to four-month period during the spring/summer.
In the second scenario, more intensive interventions could interrupt transmission and reduce case numbers to low levels.
However, once these interventions are relaxed, case numbers are predicted to rise. This gives rise to lower case numbers, but the risk of a later epidemic in the winter months unless the interventions can be sustained.
......
Flattening the curve: The report highlights suppression strategy scenarios for the UK showing intensive care unit (ICU) bed requirements. The black line shows the unmitigated epidemic. Green shows a suppression strategy incorporating closure of schools and universities, case isolation and population-wide social distancing beginning in late March 2020. The orange line shows a containment strategy incorporating case isolation, household quarantine and population-wide social distancing. The red line is the estimated surge ICU bed capacity in GB.
The blue shading shows the 5-month period in which these interventions
are assumed to remain in place. (B) shows the same data as in panel (A)
but zoomed in on the lower levels of the graph. (Source: WHO collaborating Centre / MRC GIDA / J-IDEA)
Slowing and suppressing the outbreak
The report details that for the first scenario (slowing the spread), the optimal policy would combine home isolation of cases, home quarantine and social distancing of those over 70 years. This could reduce the peak healthcare demand by two-thirds and reduce deaths by half. However, the resulting epidemic would still likely result in an estimated 250,000 deaths and therefore overwhelm the health system (most notably intensive care units).
Added: More from Imperial College “researchers” led by British subject Neil Ferguson who advised: “There’s really no option but follow in China’s footsteps and suppress.” “Researchers” add that events in China and South Korea in coming weeks will help inform UK lockdown strategy further:
March 17, 2020, “COVID-19: Imperial researchers model likely impact of public health measures,” UK Imperial College, by Dr. Sabine L. van Elsland, Ryan O'Hare
“Researchers from Imperial have analysed the likely impact of multiple public health measures on slowing and suppressing the spread of coronavirus.
The latest analysis comes from a team modelling the spread and impact COVID-19 and whose data are informing current UK government policy on the pandemic.
The findings are published in the 9th report from the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling within the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, J-IDEA, Imperial College London.
Professor Neil Ferguson, head of the MRC GIDA team and director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA), said: “The world is facing the most serious public health crisis in generations. Here we provide concrete estimates of the scale of the threat countries now face.
“We use the latest estimates of severity to show that policy strategies which aim to mitigate the epidemic might halve deaths and reduce peak healthcare demand by two-thirds, but that this will not be enough to prevent health systems being overwhelmed. More intensive, and socially disruptive interventions will therefore be required to suppress transmission to low levels. It is likely such measures – most notably, large scale social distancing – will need to be in place for many months, perhaps until a vaccine becomes available [of course there’s no guarantee a suitable vaccine will ever “become available”].”
Combining multiple measures
In the current absence of vaccines and effective drug treatments [with the exception of hydroxyquinalone cocktails which continue to show success], there are several public health measures countries can take to help slow the spread of the COVID-19. The team focused on the impact of five such measures, alone and in combination:
*Home isolation of cases – whereby those with symptoms of the disease (cough and/or fever) remain at home for 7 days following the onset of symptoms *Home quarantine – whereby all household members of those with symptoms of the disease remain at home for 14 days following the onset of symptoms
*Social distancing – a broad policy that aims to reduce overall contacts that people make outside the household, school or workplace by three-quarters.
*Social distancing of those over 70 years – as for social distancing but just for those over 70 years of age who are at highest risk of severe disease
*Closure of schools and universities
Modelling available data, the team found that depending on the intensity of the interventions, combinations would result in one of two scenarios.
In the first scenario, they show that interventions could slow down the spread of the infection but would not completely interrupt its spread. They found this would reduce the demand on the healthcare system while protecting those most at risk of severe disease. Such epidemics are predicted to peak over a three to four-month period during the spring/summer.
In the second scenario, more intensive interventions could interrupt transmission and reduce case numbers to low levels.
However, once these interventions are relaxed, case numbers are predicted to rise. This gives rise to lower case numbers, but the risk of a later epidemic in the winter months unless the interventions can be sustained.
......
Slowing and suppressing the outbreak
The report details that for the first scenario (slowing the spread), the optimal policy would combine home isolation of cases, home quarantine and social distancing of those over 70 years. This could reduce the peak healthcare demand by two-thirds and reduce deaths by half. However, the resulting epidemic would still likely result in an estimated 250,000 deaths and therefore overwhelm the health system (most notably intensive care units).
In the second scenario (suppressing the outbreak), the researchers show this is likely to require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members (and possible school and university closure). The researchers explain that by closely monitoring disease trends it may be possible for these measures to be relaxed temporarily as things progress, but they will need to be rapidly re-introduced if/when case numbers rise. They add that the situation in China and South Korea in the coming weeks will help to inform this strategy further.
Professor Azra Ghani, Chair in Infectious Disease Epidemiology from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, said: “The current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic is evolving rapidly; governments and societies therefore need to be flexible in responding the challenges it poses. Our results indicate that widescale social distancing measures, that are likely to have a major impact on our day-to-day lives, are now necessary to reduce further spread and prevent our health system being overwhelmed. Close monitoring will be required in the coming weeks and months to ensure that we minimise the health impact of this disease.”
Professor Christl Donnelly, Professor of Statistical Epidemiology within J-IDEA, said: “The challenges we collectively face are daunting. However, our work indicates if a combination of measures are implemented, then transmission can be substantially reduced. These measures will be disruptive but uncertainties will reduce over time, and while we await effective vaccines [which may never exist] and drugs, these public health measures can reduce demands on our healthcare systems.”
Professor Steven Riley, Professor of Infectious Disease Dynamics within J-IDEA, said: “We have to accept that COVID-19 is a severe infection and it is currently able to spread in countries such as the US and the UK. In this report, we show that the most stringent traditional interventions are required in the short term to halt its spread. Once they are in place, it becomes a common priority for us all to find the best possible ways to improve on those interventions”
–This article is adapted from a press release from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis
The full report is available on the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis webpage.”
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Added: UK “expert” Neil Ferguson advises Parliament on lockdown via video link. Ferguson says economies can’t restart without “wide-scale testing and contact tracing:”
March 26, 2020, “J-IDEA’s Neil Ferguson tells MPs lockdown can help NHS manage coronavirus,” Stephen Johns
“Imperial’s Neil Ferguson, Director of J-IDEA, has told MPs that the current UK lockdown could keep the coronavirus outbreak at manageable levels. Professor Ferguson was speaking to the Science and Technology Committee about the latest COVID-19 outbreak predictions.
Speaking via video link, Professor Ferguson explained that while there was some uncertainty, if current measures work as expected, then intensive care demand would ‘peak in approximately two to three weeks and then decline thereafter’.
He told the committee current predictions were that the NHS would be able to cope if strict measures continued to be followed.
Professor Ferguson, who is also Director of MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, added: “There will be some areas that are extremely stressed but we are reasonably confident – which is all we can be at the current time – that at the national level we will be within capacity.”
Wide-scale testing
Last week, Professor Ferguson’s team published a landmark report, which analysed the likely impact of multiple public health measures on slowing and suppressing the spread of coronavirus. The report from the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling within the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, J-IDEA, recommended more intensive, and socially disruptive interventions to suppress transmission to low levels.
Professor Ferguson, who has been briefing the committee during the outbreak, said that it was clear that the country could not be in lockdown for a year, but wide-scale testing and contact tracing would be required to allow economies to restart.
He said: “The challenge that many countries in the world are dealing with is how we move from an initial intensive lockdown… to something that will have societal effects but will allow the economy to restart.
“That is likely to rely on very large-scale testing and contact tracing.””
Added: More from March 16, 2020 UK virus report which for some reason presumes to address both the US and the UK. The UK team includes WHO personnel: “WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics Imperial College London.” Why is the US addressed in a UK report? The two countries are completely different. Doesn’t the US have good universities? Did Americans vote to become subjects of Prince Charles and the British monarchy again?
March 16 report: Deals with semi-permanent, possibly permanent quarantine unless and until a vaccine is found, minimum of 18 months. “Researchers” say people can’t live freely again without vaccine because virus can always recur:
page one: “We show that in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures, though it should be recognised that such closures may have negative impacts on health systems due to increased (page two) absenteeism. The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package –or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission –will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available [though there’s no guarantee a vaccine will ever become available] (potentially 18 months or more [if ever]) –given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed.
We show that intermittent social distancing –triggered by trends in disease surveillance –may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound.
Last, while experience in China and now South Korea show that suppression is possible in the short term, it remains to be seen whether it is possible long-term, and whether the social and economic costs of the interventions adopted thus far can be reduced.”
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Added: More from March 16, 2020 UK report:
“Table 3. Mitigation options for GB. Relative impact of NPI combinations applied nationally for 3 months in GB on total deaths and peak hospital ICU bed demand for different choices of cumulative ICU case count triggers. The cells show the percentage reduction in peak ICU bed demand for a variety of NPI combinations and for triggers based on the absolute number of ICU cases diagnosed in a county per week.
PC=school and university closure,
CI=home isolation of cases,
HQ=household quarantine,
SD=social distancing of the entire population,
SDOL70=social distancing of those over 70 years for 4 months (a month more than other interventions).
“Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25561/77482
Page 1of 20
Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand”
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Added: UK’s Imperial College starts “COVID-19 response fund:”
“This week Imperial launched a COVID-19 response fund to help accelerate Imperial’s critical work to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
The Imperial College COVID-19 Response Fund will supplement government and existing philanthropy to provide flexible support for vital projects in the university’s unprecedented efforts to tackle COVID-19 such as developing vaccines, improving diagnostics, advancing therapies, strengthening epidemiology and providing essential healthcare in the urgent race to defeat the novel coronavirus.”
4/16/20, Why aren’t shutdowns over? “Examining Why We Tried to Flatten the Curve,” Rush Limbaugh…Power Line: “We Never Needed To Flatten The Curve.”...”“Once again, government officials are making decisions with catastrophic effects on many millions of lives, on the basis of models that have proved to be wrong. The shutdowns should end tomorrow,” writes Mr. Hinderaker. If we can handle 810,000 hospitalizations with the flu, and the projected max number of hospitalizations for COVID-19 is 62,000, what are we doing?...It’s just that theoretically the hospitals will not be overwhelmed.”…Now we know there’s no chance of that happening.
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