Lil devils x said:
Of course there is always a peak, it is that the peak would be much higher and last much longer without mitigation.
You're seeing this partly backwards. You don't get both shorter duration and lower peak, you get one or the other.
Compare countries other than the US, this shouldn't be controversial. Germany and Italy both detected covid-19 cases in their country at approximately the same time. Germany did a lot better job mitigating the virus than Italy. Italy's peak is much higher than Germany, but it also came sooner.
The US peaking weeks after these places is not because it's been allowed to spread worse here, it's because it didn't. And this is actually really useful information for trying to compare different countries. It's difficult to put numbers next to each other from country to country because they have different populations, different testing procedures, different cause of death guidelines, and frankly some places are just liars. But among trustworthy places, you can somewhat reasonably compare data from a country one day to the same country another day. Looking at the total cases anywhere isn't useful for knowing how many people got infected, we know absolutely that people aren't all getting tested. BUT if you see the number of people infected rising or dropping day to day consistently, you can reasonably trust the direction of the trends over time. And we can compare those trends over time from place to place with reasonable confidence. Places like Germany, US, and Japan put off their peak until later than places like Spain, France, and Italy. I'm sure you're aware which of those lists suffered more dramatically.
Point being, shorter duration here is a sign that mitigation failed.
Of course social distancing, self isolation and PPE is what is lessening this as it would be so much worse without these efforts. People are being told their actions make a difference here because they actually do make a difference here.
These things are true. These actions are lessening this, they do make a difference. A consequence of those actions are that it is taking longer to get through the virus than if we had done nothing and let thousands more people die. To be clear, I'm not advocating for any changes in behavior anytime soon, but I am trying to understand what is actually happening.
From what you have previously stated you believe, without evidence, is that more people have gained a protective immunity than actually have and that belief will result in an inaccurate assessment of the impact of mitigation and what will happen when mitigation efforts are reduced. Until we have actual evidence of this, there is no reason to believe this to be true.
Except I have evidence. The Diamond Princess had the majority of its passengers never test positive, and I doubt they managed to avoid the virus in those circumstances. Small populations that have had mass testing have consistently shown people having been infected without thinking that they had, we know there are at least some asymptomatic carriers, and conventional wisdom would suggest asymptomatic carriers are disproportionately undercounted. At this point, you can look at the shape of the graphs of cases as observe the behavior of a virus that is making its way through a whole population. For example, here in PA, the governor shut things down in mid-March with few cases. The number of new cases increased dramatically for weeks after that, and now nearly a month later is smoothing out and potentially starting to turn back down. That isn't the behavior you expect from drastic measures managing to contain it. You wouldn't get that exponential growth period for that long and then a smooth turn to flat if it was dramatic measures containing it. That's the pattern of a virus that still spread through mitigation until it started running out of new victims as disease vectors. Obviously that's not hard evidence that proves anything, but if we trend back down to nothing over the course of the next month on a nice little bell curve, it makes a pretty compelling case.
And of course, at some point in the near future we're going to get antibody tests to estimate how many people have gotten it, and if I'm right at that point, then we obviously adjust course based on that. I would agree, until we get better evidence of this there is no reason to act as though it is true, but that's just being responsibly cautious. There's plenty of reason to believe it is true, just not enough to be worth risking a mistake at this moment.
