Coronavirus projections: What will America look like in coming months? - The Washington... - 0 views
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“flatten the curve” — slowing the spread of the contagion so it doesn’t overwhelm a health-care system with finite resources.
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Success means a longer — though less catastrophic — fight against the coronavirus. And it is unclear whether Americans — who built this country on ideals of independence and individual rights — would be willing to endure such harsh restrictions on their lives for months, let alone for a year or more.
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Only by enacting an entire series of drastic, severe restrictions could America shrink its death toll further, the study found. That strategy would require, at a minimum, the nationwide practice of social distancing, home isolation, and school and university closures. And such restrictions would have to be maintained, at least intermittently, until a working vaccine is developed, which could take 12 to 18 months at best.
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If we’re lucky, the coming months will probably look less like a mountain and more like a string of bumpy hills, say epidemiologists
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if authorities ease some measures in coming months or if we start letting them slip ourselves, that hill could easily turn right back into the exponential curve that has cratered Italy’s health system and that U.S. officials are desperately trying to avoid replicating
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One reason she and others are alarmed: In China, the fatality rate in Wuhan, the raging epicenter, was 5.8 percent. But in all other areas of the country it was 0.7 percent — a signal that most deaths were driven by an overwhelmed health system.
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Initially leery of alarming the public, they have increasingly compared this pandemic to the 1918 flu pandemic, the deadliest in modern history. It infected roughly a third of the world’s population and killed at least 50 million people, including at least 675,000 in the United States.Like the bumpy hills some foresee in coming months, the 1918 pandemic hit America in three waves — a mild one that spring, the deadliest wave in fall and a final one that winter.
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The crisis brought out the best in Baltimoreans — with sewing circles churning out gauze masks and hospital bedding, and neighbors donating food and services. But it also brought out the worst — xenophobic conspiracy theories that nurses of “German extraction” were deliberately infecting people. African American patients were kept out of most hospitals under Jim Crow-era segregation.
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“Pandemics aren’t just physical,” said Schoch-Spana. “They bring with them an almost shadow pandemic of psychological and societal injuries as well.”