Call for a May improvement is kind of a double-edged sword.
If you look at the timeline for other countries they have kind of this couple months that goes one or two ways and then starts to plateau. They start to go up and then they start to get ahold of it through interventions and that's the plateau. Or they shoot the moon and a ton of people just start dying and everybody freaks out and goes home with heavy-handed interventions so you start a plateau due to death.
The "Getting better in May" in New York might very well look like system overruns and all the people that can die from it are all dying at once. That's terrible but very possible. They're very dense it will still be relatively mild going into June. It's going to be pretty terrible I think
Getting better in parts of the South might be because we benefited from a lag time of infection just in time for the summer slowing down. But that's just one variable and you'll still see some serious cases happening in the urban centers. You just might see suburban and rural areas buffered.
Regardless this isn't turning a corner in May. slow down means just that. You might see a slowdown due to one variable in certain areas that are really really really hot.
And I saw your other post about how will be much better at this in the fall. Hopefully we'll see some real intervention breakthroughs in antivirals or even some good criteria on putting out anti malarials into the population to buffer against contagiousness. that might reduce our spread especially amongst young people who can tolerate this medicines anyway. The same way you take antimalarials in malaria environments prophylactically. But the logistics of that are challenging with so many people.
So then then fall comes And anywhere that benefited from a summer slowdown or didn't get hit really hard for whatever other reasons still has a huge population that doesn't have herd immunity and is still susceptible. Now you're looking at the flu season along with the Coronavirus slate on top of it. in every single model half your deaths come from system overruns. We could very easily see those system overruns happen again in the fall. So it doesn't matter if your coronavirus load is lower in the fall because the system itself will be running it decreased extra capacity from everything else in the winter.
Until we get some real treatment breakthrough or vaccine this is with us. 18 months and I hope we do it the smoldering way for that whole time and this is just something in the background we have to deal with. The alternative is that we shoot the moon kill off several times as many people, endure a serious national trauma at multiple levels, and still end up waiting for a vaccine for the rest of us.
