Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance

COVID19 - CORONAVIRUS, 30 Mar 2020

Tomas Pueyo | Medium – TRANSCEND Media Service

What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time

19 Mar 2020 – This article follows Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now, with over 40 million views and 30 translations. If you agree with this article, consider signing the corresponding White House petition. Over 30 translations available at the bottom. Running list of endorsements here. Over 10 million views so far.

Summary of the article: Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.

Within a week, countries around the world have gone from: “This coronavirus thing is not a big deal” to declaring the state of emergency. Yet many countries are still not doing much. Why?

Every country is asking the same question: How should we respond? The answer is not obvious to them.

Some countries, like France, Spain or Philippines, have since ordered heavy lockdowns. Others, like the US, UK, or Switzerland, have dragged their feet, hesitantly venturing into social distancing measures.

Here’s what we’re going to cover today, again with lots of charts, data and models with plenty of sources:

1. What’s the current situation?
2. What options do we have?
3. What’s the one thing that matters now: Time
4. What does a good coronavirus strategy look like?
5. How should we think about the economic and social impacts?

When you’re done reading the article, this is what you’ll take away:

Our healthcare system is already collapsing.
Countries have two options: either they fight it hard now, or they will suffer a massive epidemic.
If they choose the epidemic, hundreds of thousands will die. In some countries, millions.
And that might not even eliminate further waves of infections.
If we fight hard now, we will curb the deaths.
We will relieve our healthcare system.
We will prepare better.
We will learn.
The world has never learned as fast about anything, ever.
And we need it, because we know so little about this virus.
All of this will achieve something critical: Buy Us Time.

If we choose to fight hard, the fight will be sudden, then gradual.
We will be locked in for weeks, not months.
Then, we will get more and more freedoms back.
It might not be back to normal immediately.
But it will be close, and eventually back to normal.
And we can do all that while considering the rest of the economy too.

OK, let’s do this.

1. What’s the situation?

Last week, I showed this curve:

It showed coronavirus cases across the world outside of China. We could only discern Italy, Iran and South Korea. So I had to zoom in on the bottom right corner to see the emerging countries. My entire point is that they would soon be joining these 3 cases.

Let’s see what has happened since.

As predicted, the number of cases has exploded in dozens of countries. Here, I was forced to show only countries with over 1,000 cases. A few things to note:

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Tomas Pueyo – 2 MSc in Engineering. Stanford MBA. Ex-Consultant. Creator of viral applications with >20M users. Currently leading a billion-dollar business @ Course Hero.

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