[Noah930]

In short, I still think the answer is yes, trust the experts and their fears.

I think the hospital under-use is a complicated issue. Hospitals are being running a less than capacity for a variety of reasons. Elective (non-emergent) procedures have been stopped. Realistically the only people in there are people who got admitted through the emergency room (because things like heart attacks and appendicitis and CHF and diverticulitis still occur, even amongst a quarantined populace).

As a result, hospital staff are being laid off/furloughed/hours cut because there is less demand from the loss of elective procedures and because of the lack of income from those paying customers.

The reason why some hospitals are not being overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients is because of this lockdown and social distancing we're practicing. I think if you go to some hospitals in New York or New Orleans or Boston, you might have a different story. Mrs. Noah used to work at MGH in Boston, and they have 120 ICU beds filled with Covid-19 patients, as well as another 120 admitted to non-ICU beds. Or at least that was how it was last week.

But the numbers are down only because of we've sheltered in place. If we leave our homes and start moving around again, I would expect that the numbers would start to rise once again. Because we don't really have a cure or treatment for this virus.

Some will argue that won't a large portion of the population get this and be immune? I'm not so sure this is the case. Some will get this and either recover or be minimally symptomatic (or totally asymptomatic). But we don't know enough about this virus to know if an individual cannot be reinfected with this disease. Or if they were OK the first time around, is there a guarantee that they'll be OK with future reinfection?

This isn't just the seasonal flu. In addition to the pulmonary/pneumonia part of the disease, there seems to be a group of victims that have some sort of severe systemic inflammatory response like a cytokine storm that rapidly leads to multiorgan failure and death. People are getting DVTs from this to the point that some hospitals (I've heard this going on in Europe) are not only giving routine low-level daily thrombolytic prophylaxis (some sort of heparin shot), but actual treatment-level prophylactic dosing of anticoagulants to prevent DVT/PE scenario (continuous heparin drip).

I'm not saying we can keep this societal lockdown going on indefinitely or for another 12-18 months. That's not financially realistic. But we have to be careful about being too cavalier about re-opening society.