Visiting audio stores?

Not to be scary, but we are already becoming saturated here at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor - we will overwhelm ICU bed capacity by next week. My son has COVID-19 as do many of his colleagues in engineering. Please shelter at home.

My wife is the Chief Nursing Officer for a major hospital in a metropolitan area. She’s working her ass-off right now, while I stay home, play with the dogs and become a “full-time” audiophile. Works for me....

While travel bans may mitigate the situation temporarily they cannot stop the inevitable, their sole purpose is to improve the optics.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6546569/china-coronavirus-flights-canada/

While travel bans may mitigate the situation temporarily they cannot stop the inevitable, their sole purpose is to improve the optics.

I've been trying to avoid this thread and any others that deal with the outbreak, and will probably regret stepping in, but...

The month old article you referenced might as well be 100 years old.  Things have been changing at a dizzying pace, and we still don't know what we don't know.

It's not an "optics" problem.  It's a math problem. 

If the spread of the disease isn't slowed down there will be more sick people than there are ventilators and providers.  Our healthcare system runs at close to capacity as it is.  The virus is going to spread until a vaccine is developed, but if it spreads slower, hopefully we won't be putting healthcare professionals in the position of having to make decisions about who gets treatment and who gets left to die in their home.

If the spread of the disease isn't slowed down there will be more sick people than there are ventilators and providers.

This is baked in. Do the math.

Infections increase ten fold every 2 weeks. 1k becomes 100k in one month, 10M in two. Symptoms run about two weeks behind infections, intubation/death another two weeks behind that. The death count, in other words, lags infections by a month. A month in which infections increase by 100 times.

Let's say the case fatality rate is the low 1% that some claim. Its not but let's assume for the moment it is only 1%.

So what this means, by the time you get to 1k dead, it means you had 100k infected. Not now, but a month ago. In the month it took for the 1% to get sick and die the 100k infected grew to 10M.

Then in just two more weeks its 100M. Essentially everyone in the country susceptible to infection will have been infected. This is the nature of exponential growth.

Changing the numbers around, all it really does is shift the date we run out of hospitals and beds by a few days or weeks. It does not change the outcome. Nothing now can change the outcome.

The time for that was two full months ago. Back when I posted my PSA.