I don’t expect the outbreak to continue indefinitely in the US, Europe, or East Asia. As noted at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bending-curve-covid-19-how-avoid-being-wuhan-lombardy-scott-leibrand/ , we are likely to need to implement 50-75% social distancing in order to avoid overloading ICU capacity, and at that point we’ve also basically stopped growth in new cases, making it comparatively easy to keep doing more of the same until new cases start to noticeably shrink, as they did in China, Singapore, and now Korea. The real question to me is how long it takes us to bring R down to and below 1. As lunis did, I originally thought that 1 month was optimistic, but Washington State has surprised me, and seems to have implemented the necessary social distancing after about 2 weeks (mostly in the last 2 days). As a result, my estimates of the value of individual actions may have been slightly overestimated. But this is one area where I’m happy to have been wrong, as it means people were listening and finally did the right thing. :-)
scottleibrand
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Even if you want to eliminate the economic value of life and only consider their moral value, you still need to consider the economic value of avoiding hospitalization, which is about $100/day. It’s highly unlikely that buying malaria nets is higher value than actions you can take that will meaningfully contribute to overwhelming an expensive hospital system.
I just went ahead and edited this post to include the full text.
This is my first time posting here, so not sure of all the protocols: if it’d be better to duplicate the content here rather than linking to the LinkedIn post, I’m happy to move it over.
I think the relevance of Starlink here is not for serving individuals in LMICs, but for providing backhaul for towers in places too remote to easily backhaul via fiber or line of sight microwave links.