Here chew on this for a spell, commercial is almost over.
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"I know a lot of people are still saying that the public health reaction we're seeing is exaggerated, or that we must go back to work. But I don't agree at all."
www.weforum.org
Here's an excerpt:
This is still a public health crisis.
To understand this, look again at the numbers from
Worldometer. It starts with good news. By now, in most of Europe, the number of new cases seems to be flattening, as lockdowns have been in effect for two weeks or more. In Belgium the daily cases are around 1,500, in Switzerland about 1,000, and in Spain and Italy about 5,000. In the US, the curve
is still going up.
Cumulative confirmed deaths from COVID-19.
Image: Reuters Graphics
But to understand why ending the lockdown isn't possible yet, you should look at some other numbers: namely, the "active" cases and the "severe or critical" cases. Those are the people in the hospitals needing intensive care, and their number is still increasing significantly. As long as they are going up, hospitals are over capacity, and we shouldn't expect measures to be relaxed: it would mean risking many more deaths.
You can drill down these numbers for any country to understand the situation better. For the United States, for example, the data tell us the worst is yet to come. You see a high number of cases for the US these days, around 15,000 to 20,000 new cases per day, but so far, relatively few dead and severely ill. But the epidemic there started in earnest much later, so you can expect that there will be an explosion of severely ill and dead in the next few weeks.
The first symptoms typically come after about seven days and, in the next week, people that have symptoms can become severely ill. So many of those infected in the past week will only become severely ill in the coming days, and need treatment. The idea that reopening their country by Easter is feasible, is even less realistic than in Europe. (And in Europe, I wouldn't expect a return to normal for months).
There is, however, hope and progress on the horizon. To get to a fundamental solution, we need first and foremost to test more people, and that's now increasingly happening all over the world".