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“Flattening the Curve” is a deadly delusion - Joscha Bach - Medium
▻https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727

https://miro.medium.com/max/1024/1*jOyyJwEmor8XSbngQEJRVg.jpeg

What all these diagrams have in common:
• They have no numbers on the axes. They don’t give you an idea how many cases it takes to overwhelm the medical system, and over how many days the epidemic will play out.
• They suggest that currently, the medical system can deal with a large fraction (like maybe 2/3, 1/2 or 1/3) of the cases, but if we implement some mitigation measures, we can get the infections per day down to a level we can deal with.
• They mean to tell you that we can get away without severe lockdowns as we are currently observing them in China and Italy. Instead, we let the infection burn through the entire population, until we have herd immunity (at 40% to 70%), and just space out the infections over a longer timespan.

The Curve Is a Lie
[…]
The Curve with numbers

https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/1*B509lGKr5YzQtiKhiG06qQ.png

The brown line near the bottom: that’s our limited supply of ventilators and intensive care beds! The red curve does not contain all cases of COVID-19, but only those 6% that will die if we cannot put them on a ventilator for something like four weeks. In this scenario, it means that the maximum number of cases needing care on the same day, without any kind of mitigation, is around 3 million! It’s clear that we need to desperately flatten this curve, because it means that for much of the year, the vast majority of cases will not even get assessed for intubation and critical care.

How far would we need to spread a normal distribution to make sure that it fits below the limit of our medical resources?
The “flattening the curve” idea suggests that if we wash our hands and stay at home while being sick aggressively enough, we won’t have to stop the virus from becoming endemic and infecting 40% to 70% of all people, but we can slow the spread of the infection so much that out medical system can deal with the case load. This is how our normally distributed curve looks like when it contains 10.8 million patients, of which no more than 170,000 are ill at the same time:

https://miro.medium.com/max/4800/1*FoIElQyKudIShpnBHckC5A.png

Dampening the infection rate of COVID-19 to a level that is compatible with our medical system means that we would have to spread the epidemic over more than a decade! (Far to the left, you see our unmitigated distribution for comparison.) I am pretty confident that we will have found effective treatments until then, but you get the idea: reducing the infectivity of the new corona virus to a manageable level is simply not going to be possible by mitigation, it will require containment.

My curves are not correct!
My back-of-the-envelope calculation is not a proper simulation, or a good model of what’s going on either. Don’t cite it as such! In reality, the spread of a disease does not follow a normal distribution. It is going to be left-skewed, with a long tail.