One way to explain the hospital surge in NYC is that a small percentage of people have had a highly fatal disease. Another plausible explanation is that a much larger number of people have had a less-fatal disease.
To date, we've had very poor estimates for fatality rates and prevalence. It wouldn't be shocking at all to find out that we're off by a factor of 10-, 20-, or even 50-fold.
Typically a sufficiently infectious disease tops out around 50-80% (don't have a source, just what people, like Angela Merkel have been saying). So this implies NYC is already off the high end of that. Hard to believe.
That's basically the
top end of the estimate of what is theoretically possible without a lockdown and infinite time. I just don't buy that it is already maxed out like that.
It's the top end estimate from the study. Even if you take the low-end estimate (~30x), there would be 4.2M cases, which is still ~50% of the New York population.
Basically, you're just saying that you don't want to believe what they're saying, therefore it's hard to believe. But there's nothing illogical or impossible about it in the slightest.
You keep making assumption. You have to concluded the lock-down did nothing, has done nothing, and hasn't prevented any infections. You can make assumption because the numbers don't align to what you assumed they'd be.
One way to explain the hospital surge in NYC is that a small percentage of people have had a highly fatal disease. Another plausible explanation is that a much larger number of people have had a less-fatal disease.
To date, we've had very poor estimates for fatality rates and prevalence. It wouldn't be shocking at all to find out that we're off by a factor of 10-, 20-, or even 50-fold.