re: Players’ union expects no fans at NBA games during 2020-21 season

Flattening is a means to an end, if you can’t achieve the end goal, the point of flattening becomes rather pointless.

The goal is to get the virus under control so that as you reopen you don’t see another peak, you don’t see exponential growth re-emerge, you don’t see hospitals risk capacity, you don’t see hospitals have to keep other aspects of healthcare shut down for fear of spread, you don’t risk secondary deaths because resources are tied up with the pandemic, so you can test and trace new clusters to ensure they don’t lead to uncontrollable spread in a community. And in that context almost no state has achieved that end goal of flattening the curve.

The CDC model didn’t change silently, they, along with other organizations like the Harvard medical research team and the Heritage foundation all looked at the information, history, and science we had and generated/revised their standards as the science became clearer. And independently they all basically came to the same conclusions. Including, that flattening the curve through social distancing policy, lockdowns, and masks is a means to end toward decreasing, controlling, and eradicating the virus. If all you are doing is plateauing the spread temporarily before you reignite exponential growth, uncontrollable community spread, and butt up against hospital capacity, you aren’t really achieving the goal(which is what is going on with many states, including the emerging hotspots in Florida, Arizona, and Texas). Now how using new information to better inform your analysis and aid in your prescription is being considered a sin by you is beyond me.

As for the Swedish model and your last paragraph, that didn’t work. And it’s utterly stupid as their experiment demonstrates. You can’t predict who will get it and many carriers don’t even realize it til they have been spreading the disease for 7-14 days. You would need to get half the population infected for it to even begin having a measurable impact and based on current trends that would mean 100’s of thousands of more people dead in just months and the healthcare system absolutely coming to the brink. And just from a logical perspective it makes no sense, treatment and capacity is continually improving, so why would you ever want to rush people getting infected when you have very effective ways to reduce spread, even to the point of near eradication as some countries have already done, when you can take proactive steps so when people do get infected, at a lower rate, over a longer horizon, treatment and capacity is stronger.