The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has become America’s go-to web resource for finding peak, then vanishing COVID-19. Are they right?
An insightful interview with Alex Engler, a data scientist from Georgetown and the Brookings Institute. The punchline is the following: The IHME model is GOOD, it’s intention was to scare people into how to really fight a pandemic, social distancing to the max, at least for a period of time. And to some extent that worked. But it, unfortunately, led people to also believe that the disease will be virtually gone by mid-June. This is not going to happen. We have hammered this disease…the blunt tool of locking everything down. And now, we will be dancing with the virus for months and months. The hammer and the dance. We’ll get better at that dance the better we get at testing, contact tracing, personal hygiene, public health, etc…until a game-changing therapeutic shows up, or until we have a vaccine.
It’s our responsibility as citizens and business owners to get re-opening right and make it safe for our employees and customers during this long dance we will have to do.
