What does the other side of the curve look like?
As shelter in place compliance begins to unravel around the country, egged on by the President and the death cult of the GOP who would sacrifice grandma for an extra 2% on the S&P 500, it's worth taking a look at what the other side of "flattening the curve" really means. The President says this is what we can expect out of deaths for flattening the curve due to social distancing
See that nice parabola? It goes up one side and goes down the other side just as quickly?
That's not going to happen. First of all, we haven't seen the peak yet. If you're not sure, let's look at two countries, the US and Italy. Italy is a ways ahead of us. Let's look at a population normalized curve of deaths because deaths are the most reliable indicator we have. (And yes, even deaths are being undercounted)
Two things to note here. On the Italy graph, that's what a peak looks like. We don't know that we've hit it yet because we're still growing cases, not decreasing. Second things to note? Look at Italy: their graph doesn't drop on the other side of the peak like in the President's graph.
Italy is ostensibly in full public-awareness mode like no other country in the world. They're past their hump, and they still aren't seeing a drop off. That's not how this disease works in modern civilization. Same story in Spain, too:
Instead of a drop, there's a long slow decline even with social distancing in effect. To their credit, this is shown in the UW IHME model for the USA as a whole, though not California, because the USA as a whole is not implementing full social distancing:
California is, though, so our drop off is more severe from here on out:
So what does this mean? In the best of times, maintaining social distancing, we are in for a long slow decline in the best case scenario. But instead the White House insists we start returning to "normal life" before we've hit our peak. If we do this, we are going to hockey stick our infection curve, possibly without even seeing a peak event. And if enough of the country follows it won't matter what California does because we are all interconnected. Nevada's public health policy is intertwined with California's whether we like it or not.
Get ready for a little flattening, followed by a hockey stick.
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