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+--- Thread: Number of U.S. COVID-19 cases could be high as 150,000 + Pandemic may last 18 months (/thread-8267.html)
Number of U.S. COVID-19 cases could be high as 150,000 + Pandemic may last 18 months - C C - Mar 20, 2020
Pandemic “will last 18 months or longer,” leaked US gov’t report warns
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/us-govt-expects-18-month-pandemic-with-widespread-supply-shortages/
EXCERPT: The US government is reportedly preparing for the coronavirus pandemic to last 18 months or longer and result in "significant shortages for government, private sector, and individual US consumers." A 100-page US government plan was leaked to The New York Times, which ... published an article summarizing the highlights. [...] The plan's warnings include the following:
Shortages of products may occur, impacting health care, emergency services, and other elements of critical infrastructure... This includes potentially critical shortages of diagnostics, medical supplies (including PPE [personal protective equipment] and pharmaceuticals), and staffing in some locations.
State and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure and communications channels, will be stressed and potentially less reliable. These stresses may also increase the challenges of getting updated messages and coordinating guidance to these jurisdictions directly... (MORE - details)
Real number of U.S. COVID-19 cases could be high as 150,000, new estimates suggests
https://gizmodo.com/real-number-of-u-s-coronavirus-cases-could-be-as-high-1842411303
EXCERPT: The official tally of covid-19 in America is climbing steeply as more people are finally being tested, with at least 80,000 people tested and more than 8,000 reported cases as of March 19. But preliminary forecasts created by epidemiologists paint a far grimmer picture of the novel coronavirus’s spread in the U.S.: We may already have tens of thousands of cases and possibly more than 150,000. [...] One study found that the virus may have been circulating undetected among people in Washington state as early as mid-January...
[...] It’s true that the U.S. has only recently started to enact or contemplate the sort of drastic actions to reduce transmission that countries such as South Korea—touted for its fast, so far effective response to covid-19—have. But that’s not to say that these actions can’t have a real impact on the course of the disease from this point on.
Some researchers have argued that if U.S. testing capability improves greatly, to the point where we can quickly find and isolate potential clusters as South Korea has done, we can still substantially drive down cases and deaths in the months to come. We might be able to do this without necessarily having to keep ourselves completely isolated from one another for the next 18 months. While some experimental treatments for covid-19 haven’t panned out in small trials, others seem promising. Any effective treatment could obviously cut down the huge number of deaths predicted.
But even without these hopeful developments, we can do something right now to stem covid-19, as Perkins notes. “We’re well on our way to this being a bad situation, but there is a lot we can do to prevent it from being even worse. Social distancing is key to achieving that, as is continued testing and isolation,” he said. “As people see the numbers of cases and deaths continue to rise for a while, they need to keep in mind that those numbers would have been even worse if we weren’t taking the measures that we are.” (MORE - details)