Originally
posted by
Requiem:
The entire reason to reduce the curve, so to speak, is not to reduce the number of people infected but to reduce the spike so that hard life or death decisions based on supplies don't need to be made. It may seem harsh to hear that a doctor (or nurse) has to make a decision such as who gets a life saving breathing machine and who doesn't but that is their reality and they have to live with their decisions.
Healthcare provides try to save everyone who enters their doors, at least in the US.
Req if you have no guidelines for how to deal with a massive increase in intensive care, when the resources for example ventilators are not enough its time to rethink now unless you want even more fatalities.
Keeping the ICU needs lower than the ICU capacity is about keeping the fatality rate low. If someone that could have been saved by say a ventilator doesn't get it thats an entirely preventable fatality. Imperial college, in their modelling study, assumed that about 2x as many people would need ICU care than that would eventually die, which means the fatality rate could potentially more than double if ICU capacity is totally overwhelmed(assuming that other branches of healthcare somehow is not overwhelmed in such a situation), since not everyone who dies actually gets to an ICU first.
I don't know how accurate that is, but its still the only really exhaustive estimate of the effects I have found:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/...-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
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The whole thing about trusting China or not is a farce in this thread. You got an official number which should be scrutinized, and it has been and its an ongoing process. But what some posters here seem to imply is that their imagination is a better guide for how many fatalities actually occurred in Wuhan, and that anyone scrutinizing their fantasies are naive.
When it comes to the many urns there could be an entirely logical explaination in that Hubei province(which was locked down) has 70m inhabitants and if the crematoriums have been shut off for some weeks you would be looking at a backlog of around 1500-2000 corpses per day dying from non-covid19 related diseases and old age, that the lockdown was active for that needs to be worked through. Assuming a 4 week backlog that is up to about 50000 dead that needs to be cremated/buried in that province.
Either way since the only objection to the chinese numbers so far is 'It's China, so they are obviously lying', which does not stand up to even the most basic scrutiny, you can't make up any number more credible than the official chinese number.
I am not a friend of China. I dare say that my post a few months ago about China is the harshest critizism of them anyone ever voiced on any EE forum, and I stand by them.