Quote:
Originally Posted by VilleN
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That is not true, the death rate doesn't change because you've gone into lockdown. By going into lockdown you slow the transmission rate and therefore ease the impact on the society (think hospitals, etc). The same number of people are likely to be affected in the long term, but what you want to avoid is an exponential spike which can cripple a country (see:Italy).
Edit: I may have misunderstood - were you saying the deaths overall will be less if you go into lockdown (true) or the death rate would go down (not true).?
Second edit: I have been doing some more reading and apparently I am actually wrong here, and it makes complete sense why. My apologies to Kovaz. If you go into lockdown and the system does not get overwhelmed you are far more likely to survive, so this does in fact affect the death rate.
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Yep, nailed it with the second edit. It's the 10-20% of people that need hospital care that are most important here - they'll pretty much all recover if there's a bed + whatever other equipment there for them, but if there's no capacity to treat them a lot of them will die. It's all about "flattening the curve" so we're not all sick at the same time.