Two weeks to flatten the curve.
@verretor Though as much as we make fun of that, remember that the problem is that we _succeeded_ beyond all expectations. We crushed that curve with unsustainable measures.
The problem is almost no country could get that curve to zero. So it came back. Probably with new mutations, just like antibiotic resistance, because lockdown's serial transmission is actually the worst scenario re: evolutionary resistance.
Flattening the curve was supposed to end in herd immunity, slowly.
@verretor What do I mean by "serial transmission"?
I mean the average distance between different infected people. Because evolution is incremental, it needs lots of steps to evolve new abilities.
Without lockdown, each person might infect, say, 5 people. That explodes, so everyone gets infected in just a few steps.
Without lockdown, each person might infect, say, 1.1 people. That grows slowly, so there's tons of steps between you and the first infection. Yet it still reaches ~100% eventually.
@verretor There's still debate on whether or not these new variants are actually more infectious, more deadly, etc. It's hard to tell, because random chance also makes some variants get lucky, and there are examples where they haven't become more common.
But assuming they are real, then they're 100% expected from lockdown: whatever lets the virus spread faster will be selected for. Unfortunately, spreading better can absolutely mean being more deadly to the small minority of people at risk.
@verretor There's this myth that many people have been pushing - including mainstream media - that diseases evolve to become less deadly over time. That can be true in things like ebola, which kill a huge % of the people who are infected. But covid is usually a mild illness; it kills a tiny minority. There's no direct evolutionary pressure there to become less deadly, because the people it kills are mostly irrelevant to it's fitness.