Reaching the Plateau: Coronavirus Lessons from China and South Korea

John MuellerMuch of the discussion about policy designed to deal with the corona virus has stressed the need to “flatten the curve.” But it might better be labelled, “reach the plateau.”Important and illustrative are the cases of China and South Korea. After two or three weeks of rapid increases in the number of deaths and of new cases, both numbers ceased to rise much and that condition has persisted. Most impressive in this is the case count. Its rapid rise was substantially due to improvements and expansion of efforts to detect cases, and plateauing took place even as those efforts continued to improve and expand.Although there is no way to know at present whether the hiatus in China and Korea will prove to be permanent, the experiences suggest that the epidemic can be contained, and that extrapolations concluding that the number of cases will soar into the hundreds of thousands or even millions in a country are not necessarily sound.The virus came to the United States later, and the country seems only now to be in the early portion of the rapid ‐​increase phase. The China and South Korean comparisons would suggest, then, that for the next two or three weeks the US will continue to experience substantial increases in the death count and in the number of cases detected. The latter count will likely be greatly enhanced by improvements in case detection, an important enterprise in which the US has previously been comparatively slow. After that, there would be...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs