Keep your eye on the prize.

Remember how the social distancing and shutdowns were designed to flatten the curve? And do you remember the purpose of the flattening? That's right: it was to prevent the number of cases from exceeding our medical services capacity to handle the number of cases.

— Physics Geek (@physicsgeek) April 20, 2020

Click for the thread which is a well articulated argument to stay focused on agreed goals and not become confused by ancillary or political issues.

The prize was to prevent the pandemic from overwhelming the medical system as it has in a number of countries, thereby causing a corollary accelerated degradation in health. By all accounts, the goal has been achieved. We don't have enough testing (regulatory incompetence at the beginning), and medical PPE supplies are still inadequate (collapse of global supply chains due to economic shut-downs) but other than a small handful of places, it sounds like most our hospitals are underutilized rather than over-utilized. They cancelled all non-essential services and the spike in Covid-19 cases hasn't manifested itself yet.

New York remains the example - New York City has very local constraints but they have plenty of beds and back-up such as USNS Comfort. Upstate, it sounds like there just isn't much business in hospitals at the moment.

Because the virus spreads at different rates under different circumstances, there is no single curve applicable to all the US. We cannot say we are out of the woods. But the places most likely to get overwhelmed the earliest are near, at or just past their peaks. Broadly speaking. Other places will have their peaks at other times. The peaks will still come. But we have bought time and new drug treatments and, later, new vaccines will come available.

There has been interesting research by an academic in Israel suggesting that the aggregate number of fatalities under the curve remain broadly the same regardless of the shape of the curve. The ultimate death rate being dependent on pre-existing conditions, not on interventions such as flattening the curve. Conditions such as general population morbidity, average population age, personal hygiene norms, population transience (number of people encountered per day), density, etc.

From Times of Israel, Top Israeli prof claims simple stats show virus plays itself out after 70 days.

A prominent Israeli mathematician, analyst and former general claims simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.

Prof Isaac Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development, told Israel’s Channel 12 (Hebrew) Monday night that research he conducted with a fellow professor, analyzing the growth and decline of new cases in countries around the world, showed repeatedly that “there’s a set pattern” and “the numbers speak for themselves.”

While he said he supports social distancing, the widespread shuttering of economies worldwide constitutes a demonstrable error in light of those statistics. In Israel’s case, he noted, about 140 people normally die every day. To have shuttered much of the economy because of a virus that is killing one or two a day is a radical error that is unnecessarily costing Israel 20% of its GDP, he charged.

The original paper is here, with graphs.

We don't understand enough yet and we have to make expensive (lives and money) decisions without great confidence of the outcomes. But it is important to keep our eye on the prize which everyone agrees on - Don't crash the medical system in the short term. Then we can get to the really messy goals - how to save the most number of net lives at the least possible cost in the shortest time possible without sacrificing freedom, growth, and opportunity.

Meanwhile, there is another common pattern emerging. A universal one.

Never let a crisis go to waste. Avoid public discussion. Use emergency powers to circumvent public debate. Sneak in funding for pet projects. All just temporarily, of course. Those who are not to be trusted and who are the most self-centered are the most revealed by their actions during such a crisis. Where everything is to advance their interests and ignore the public prize on which we ought to be focused.