If nothing were done 1% to 2% of the popular could die. If the current or steps can limit infections the toll might be far less.
But the lockdown has last till a good treatment and/or an effective vaccine is developed.
It appears there are treatments that are working, according to doctors... (i.e., those that haven't been laid off, along with nurses and other health care professionals during this supposed crisis...Thousands of US medical workers furloughed, laid off as routine patient visits drop during coronavirus pandemic)
What's with that?
I thought the hospitals were going to be overrun?
Here we have both public (free hospitals) and private (fee for service) hospitals and much elective surgery is done by the private hospitals.
But all elective surgery and non-emergency dental work (I just squeezed in
) has been deferred and this lead to many nurses in private hospitals being laid off.
All COVID-19 hospitalised cases here are being treated in public hospitals - including one where one of my grand-daughters is working as an intern.
So many of these laid-off nurses and even trainee nurses are finding work in the public system.
If necessary non-COVID-19 cases in the public system will be shunted off to the private hospitals so for a while we will effectively have no private hospitals - where I've always gone
but we're all in it together.
I don't know about in the USA but here in Australia the hospitals are not yet overrun but neither the number infected nor the more important number hospitalised hasn't yet peaked by a long shot.
And we are just starting to test the wider community with some random tests to gauge whether there might be undetected pockets of infection.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/06/navarro_virtually_every_covid-19_patient_in_new_york_is_given_hydroxychloroquine.html
"You may find this interesting," he told the CNN host. "In the city that you live in, in New York, in the New York health and hospitals system, virtually every patient now that comes in presenting COVID-19 symptoms is given a cycle of hydroxychloroquine, and when I discussed this last night with Mitch Katz, who is the head of that system, I asked him, are you doing that because the federal government is telling you or because you think it may work? And he said quite clearly that it may work."
Yes both hydroxychloroquine and the Japanese Flu drug, Favipiravir, are being tested.
In Australia, the TB vaccine, BCG, is being trialled, see this Irish report
Coronavirus: More ‘striking’ evidence BCG vaccine might protect against Covid-19.And this:
Has the key to a coronavirus vaccine been staring us in the face for a century?
Why has Spain had almost 11,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic while Portugal’s death toll barely exceeds 200?
Such a disparity in numbers within the Iberian peninsula is mysterious, but it could in part be explained by the two countries’ different use of a vaccine. Not a vaccine against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus – no such vaccine exists yet, rather it is the decades-old tuberculosis vaccine that seems to offer an explanation.
A new scientific study has discovered a possible correlation between countries where it is mandatory to be vaccinated against tuberculosis, also called “Bacillus Calmette-Guerin” (BCG), and the impact of the new coronavirus.
"We found that countries without universal policies of BCG vaccination (Italy, Netherlands, USA) have been more severely affected compared to countries with universal and long-standing BCG policies", the study's authors wrote.
And read the rest comparing Italy (no BCG vaccination) with Japan (universal BCG vaccination).
It's early days yet but BCG might at least reduce the severity of COVID-19 - we'll just have to wait and see.
But don't take any notice of my opinion I'm no medical expert
.