Controlling the spread in the early stages seems to be most critical.
Of course! It's an exponential, with a decay rate on the far side which also scales somewhat exponentially, due to escapes from quarantine, etc.
It's why the delay over the last two months (when it became extremely clear that coronavirus had entered the country, in mid-January) has been so tragic (and completely unnecessary since everyone knew it was already here).
I think they screwed up the bottom of their box. To our best knowledge, fatality rate is 1%. Perhaps there are some uncounted cases out there, but South Korea suggests there are not too many (they have near containment, partially by identifying most carriers). In any case it certainly is not 0.1%.
Here's a great thread outlining how we'll get out of this, most likely (if we want to get out quickly, by mid-May):
Jeremy FLATTEN THE CURVE Konyndyk on Twitter
Importantly, rather than fiddling around now with masks and ventilators and such (which we absolutely ALSO have to be doing), we need to be establishing NOW the network of surveillance, the tracking protocols & programs (you'll need to consent to anonymized tracking to be allowed to leave your house, for a period of a couple months - I think easily enforceable under gov't quarantine powers but I don't really care about the legal aspects at all), the screening stations, MASSIVE testing capacity, etc., which we will need to exit phase 1. It's an enormous undertaking, but the federal gov't should be able to manage it if they start NOW, so it can be ready by the end of April/early May. This is why it is so important for the Trump administration to start acting NOW to listen to the experts on this, who can guide us out of this self-inflicted problem, and avoid a repeat of the debacle that caused this outbreak to get to this enormous size in the first place.
Unfortunately, we can't gamble on a vaccine "miraculously" showing up. It's ok to spend 100 billion dollars building this up, only to have it be rendered irrelevant by a vaccine - we'll need to dust off the plans the next time this happens, anyway.
Also, we need to pass that $3 trillion in stimulus ASAP ($1 trillion isn't going to do it - learn the lessons of the Great Recession...) and stop fiddling around, so we can focus Congress on the actual problem...
And then, everyone can resume making money again.
