maxdancona wrote:As I understand it, what they are trying to do is minimize a crisis of hospital beds. They can do this by slowing down the spread until human beings start to develop herd immunity (and at some point a vaccine). Lots of people will get sick... but hopefully you can spread it out so that not everyone is sick at the same time.
I doubt that we will achieve herd immunity until after we have a vaccine.
But you are correct on the desirability of slowing the spread of the disease because of the limited number of hospital beds.
If everyone is sick at once, we will not have enough hospital beds (and ventilators, for the extremely ill) to treat everyone. Lots of people will die from lack of treatment because we simply don't have enough equipment to treat everyone at once.
If we can manage to slow the spread of the pandemic, the first people to get sick will get through the illness in time to free up hospital beds and ventilators for the second round of people who get sick, who will get through the illness in time to free up hospital beds and ventilators for the third round of people who get sick, etc.
We'll likely not slow the spread of the disease enough to save everyone, but the more we slow the spread of the disease, the more lives we will save.