Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand diseases don’t reach 100% of the population on the same day. Quarantine has been surprisingly effective in China, though at significant economic cost. That seems to be a much larger concern than the capacity of heathcare systems. If this becomes a true epidemic it’s going to be bad, but societies have been dealing with epidemics for a long time.
> On the other hand diseases don’t reach 100% of the population on the same day. That's absolutely true, even in Wuhan the %age of infected people on the total population is relatively small, but much larger than the # of ICU beds that existed. And the virus had a long time to spread around there before any countermeasures were taken. Even so, ventilators and ICU beds are not normally all available either. > Quaranti…
Effective medication is a very recent thing. Variolation dates back to the 10th century and was moderately effective, but quarantine is thousands of years old. Avoiding cannibalism and thus prion diseases is also from antiquity, but that’s simply another type of avoidance.