Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
You asked 3 or 4 days ago why Missouri's 'peak' date was so far out - that's your answer.
If you sit there and hover at 80%, you'll be sitting there at 80% forever. You'll trade peak on the front for drag on the back. In the end your outcomes won't be any better (because you never had anyone the 80% scenario OR the 100% scenario who fell out of the pool for lack of capacity), but you'll have dragged it out unnecessarily.
Analogy time!!! What do you know about racing? Key to a fast lap is apexing your corners and being able to time your acceleration coming out of the backside of the turn. And to do that correctly, you need to time your deceleration nearly perfectly so that you dive into that corner and your lateral Gs will hold exactly as strong as needed at the apex of the curve. Then once you hit the apex you can mat the damn thing and come blasting out of the corner.
What coming well short of capacity is akin to is simply decelerating too much. Sure, you'll still make the turn, but you'll miss your apex point and you'll end up losing momentum and attack angle. You'll have never risked staying too tight and ending up sliding into the wall on the exit, but you'll also have lousy lap times.
It isn't important to just stay beneath the line - it's important to get as close to it as you can comfortably do so because that's how you achieve the best balance of outcomes and time.
There's even a comparison for going beyond capacity and 'passing under braking' as an extremely aggressive approach that will also yield worse outcomes but may be necessary if your prioritizing position over a stopwatch, but that's just too far in the weeds at that point.
|
You don't want it at 100% when you don't have a limitless supply of therapeutics and providers. Just because the hospitals weren't filled to capacity didn't mean that providers weren't using garbage bags and ponchos as PPE, and that they weren't using third and fourth line induction and sedation agents instead of first line agents. That means more trips into the rooms, more exposure, more PPE use, and more burn on the system in a time where pharmaceuticals are already difficult to acquire due to shutdowns.
The point wasn't to redline the system, because herd immunity wasn't the goal. The goal was and is to limit cases as much as possible because the amount of hospitalizations required to reach herd immunity is too high for the hospital system to sustain it. There's a reason why surgeons don't schedule 24 hours of surgery a day, but instead spread it over several days--you may clear your cases out faster, but you're putting an unsustainable drag on the provider
If these numbers hold, then it's proof that the distancing measures are working. It's also proof that short of an abject disaster, Leavitt's quote was right: "Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after will seem inadequate."