HACKER Q&A
📣 flatTheCurve

Does Flattening the curve only benefit 0.5%?


Assumptions- 4% of people with coronavirus die, pick any number you'd like, but the specific number isn't important. 12% of people on ventilators live.

If you flatten the curve, you give hospital access to everyone who could potentially die. This means 4% times 12% = 0.48% lives are saved by flattening the curve.

Services like oxygen are not exclusive to hospitals, so they do not benefit by flattening the curve.

My question is, are there any other benefits to flattening the curve?

  👤 bb2018 Accepted Answer ✓
First off, if you extrapolate the 0.5% estimate to the general population that could get the disease (let's just say 60% before herd immunity kicks in) that is one million people in America. I'm not sure if another reason is needed other than not having one-million people die in a very short amount of time.

- Survival from the disease is likely to be dependent on hospital capacity. It is reasonable to think that outcomes would be better if hospitals were not overworked. The only place in the United States were hospitals were truly overcrowding (and it is still not nearly as bad as it could have been without flattening) was New York. You can see how many people died at home (either due to unrelated health conditions that they couldn't get treated for or having covid but not being able to go to the hospital). https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona.... Read stories or talk to nurses/doctors in your life about triage care.

- Treatments could improve significantly over time. For example, ventilators may not even be the recommended course of action for many cases. It is not likely we will have a miracle cure, but some treatments could help. https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/coronavirus-disea...