I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

Assuming all it takes is a strict 3 week shutdown, why can’t we have that? Or is the assumption wrong? Why weren’t we able to produce enough stock for 3 weeks of total halt?

This is really poorly reasoned. To take a couple examples:

> Using data from flu monitoring programs in prior years, the CDC models project that 70 MILLION Americans have already gotten sick with symptomatic Covid, but decided to just write it off as a bad cold and never got tested. I am not making this up.

Why is this hard to believe? Covid testing, especially depending on where you live, can be difficult to obtain. If you have a cough and a loss of sense of smell but nothing debilitating, getting a Covid test just satisfies your curiosity, because you're going to be isolating anyway.

> I mean, take that Re up to 3.0 (the high end of the current Ireland estimate), and a single Covid case will result in 5.2 BILLION total cases over a 100-day period, about 60% of the entire human population on the planet. Obviously our social behaviors around the disease would change dramatically well before we got to that point.

"Social behaviors" are not what slows down Rt when you get to 60% of the entire human population infected; the number of targets gradually diminishes, slowing the spread.

Potatoes, a new world food, were a monoculture in Ireland at the time. These days there are a huge number of potato varieties grown, so a devastating potato blight seems unlikely to occur again.

What everyone seems to be assuming is that this new strain will cause a constant increase in the reproduction number R of ~50% in every situation. I haven't really seen any discussion of if and why that is actually a good extrapolation to make.

So for example in a specific situation, with a specific type of intermingling of a population in which the R value was, say, 1.2, we think the new strain caused that to increase to an R value of 1.8. How does it necessarily follow that taking intervention measures that bring the R value of the base strains down to, say, 0.8 would bring the R value of the new strain to exactly 1.2?

There are just so many factors involved, it doesn't seem like this could possibly be knowable right now. So there may be some hope that things like getting everyone N95 masks and requiring their use, and closing down indoor activities, which are good measures to control the current strains anyway, could also bring down the reproduction number of the new strain below 1 as well.

However, this is all a purely academic exercise anyway. Even in places that are being "aggressive" in countering the virus like San Francisco, we have done exactly nothing to react to new information in the past 1.5 months. Our "lockdown", which is entirely optional and has no teeth, is clearly not working, but we have neither removed it or strengthened it. The health department has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine. It feels like we've just given up altogether, and we're praying that the private market saves us by somehow distributing the vaccines effectively. And on top of all that, we've handicapped the private market by making it illegal to distribute the vaccine to the vast majority of the population, even the elderly and vulnerable groups!

> getting a Covid test just satisfies your curiosity, because you're going to be isolating anyway.

Ehhh, people might be avoiding the test ... to avoid having to isolate. I am making this shit up, but I wouldn't be surprised.