The Effectiveness of Targeted Quarantine for Minimising Impact of COVID-19

Alastair D Jamieson-Lane; Eric Cytrnbaum

Age ICU risk per age cohort, the country would expect to see at minimum 66,000 ICU patients over the course of an epidemic. Thus, assuming that severe cases require 14 days in ICU, treatment of all patients would require over 900,000 ventilator days -amounting to five years of continuous use of all ventilators. This is 15 times more demand than could be accommodated in the expected 4 month span of an unmitigated epidemic. The details of this calculation may vary from country to county, but the final conclusion is ubiquitous: hospitals are not prepared for this disease. Efforts to "flatten the curve" will need to reduce the epidemic peak not merely by a factor of two, but instead by an order of magnitude or more. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, for the most well equipped countries, such efforts must be maintained for years on end.