A lot of people have decried the “liberal media” and “liberal university professors”, and instead glorified the bankrupcy-laden actor/’businessman’ Trump as a veritable medical expert with his words about hydroxychloroquine. However, when it comes to real medical issues, or any topic of study, one would want to pay close attention to people who are well-educated as experts in the field. In the case of pandemics, a medical expert on pandemics would be one to listen to, such as the case with Dr. William Hanage, a Harvard University professor who specializes in such, and in an article from the UK Guardian written by him states that the current COVID-19 pandemic is just beginning.
Talk of the “peak” can be misleading, because it’s not clear whether you are talking about the Matterhorn or Table Mountain – both have a summit, but the peak is far more pronounced in one than the other. In countries such as Italy (unlike Wuhan) the initial surge in the Covid-19 pandemic has not evaporated quickly. There are multiple reasons for this but the most important is that the impact of physical distancing achieved in China has been hard to accomplish elsewhere, mostly because of the freedoms we correctly value in liberal democracies.
Worse, there may be a mountain range. In other words, what is happening right now could be just one peak – not the peak. And the reason for this is that despite all those positive signs from antibody testing, the huge majority of the population is not immune.
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I am going to be unusually optimistic here, and assume that everyone who has Covid-19 becomes fully immune (not a given), and that the virus is towards the less transmissible end of the range of estimates currently available. If this is the case, you would need half your population to have been infected to achieve a level of population immunity that would stop the epidemic continuing to grow and overwhelming healthcare systems.
As I write the UK is reporting more than 10,000 deaths from Covid-19. Due to the realities of collecting data during an infectious disease emergency like this, that is likely to be an underestimate. Again, if we assume this is the peak and there is the same number on the way down that’s 20,000 total from the initial surge. And to get to population immunity you have to multiply that by at least 30: based on the current data, that’s about 600,000 deaths to get there, minimum. (source)
Unfortunately, if this prediction is true, there is going to be a lot more pain coming in for the future.
This whole disease situation cannot be trusted- the information is questionable, it is highly politicized, and it is connected to strange movement in the military and industrial complecies as well as their related businesses.
Until we know (a) what strain is infecting what people in what location and with what death to recovery rates, and (b) how to effectively manage this disease outside of the current measures being taken, things for the most part will likely best be handled by the current means lest the conditions for a wider pandemic be realized.