Regarding the NCAA tournament, it pisses me off but I understand it, but it's also hypocritical. I understand social distancing for safety, but bringing teams from diverse geographic regions to get together and literally be up in each other's faces for 40 minutes of basketball? Yeah there's a problem with that. They just need to shut the whole thing down.
Yep, I agree that postponing or canceling the games altogether would be ideal. But not having fans in attendance is much better than a packed indoor stadium.
For those who think that the list of steps I suggested is harsh, consider that every country with a medium to large number of cases, with the exceptions of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, tried to slow play it initially, worrying about the economic ramifications of a more drastic approach. As the cases multiplied exponentially, all started to understand that a drastic approach is necessary. The US is on the verge of falling into that same trap. Slow playing it and telling everyone to keep calm, "it's just a flu, bro" doesn't stave off panic once the hospitals are full. And then the panic (and economic impact) will be much worse because the people will feel leaderless and not trust anything the government tells them.
Please read that article I linked above from a doctor in Italy. This is northern Italy (not the poorer south, and certainly not a third world country), and their hospitals are drowning. They are treating people in the corridors for lack of space.
This is NOT the flu. One key difference that impacts hospitals is length of illness. This virus is knocking some healthy people on their ass for a few WEEKS, not just 2-3 days like the flu. And for those who need acute medical care, they are often in hospital for 6 weeks or even longer. Think about that length of hospital stay in the context of an infection that will grow exponentially if no checks are applied - before you know it, the hospitals will be overflowing - which means people dying who could have been saved by a healthcare system that is not overwhelmed.
We need to test like South Korea. That means everyone who wants to be tested can get tested. With millions of test kits shipping this week, that should be possible, but we have to minimize the hurdles. People aren't going to get tested if it costs them a lot, or if a positive result means they have to forego pay and self-quarantine. Trump admin and insurers addressed the testing cost issue yesterday, so that's good. Now they have to incentivize people who test positive to self-quarantine. Once we test a few million people, we will have a much better picture of the entire iceberg of the epidemic, and we can start linking those cases into transmission chains.
If it turns out that most infected persons fall into identifiable transmission chains, we can ease up on the social distancing measures (which are like a scattergun approach) because now we'll know where to look for new cases (contacts of those in the transmission chain), so we can fall back to a sniper rifle approach. But until we get a handle on the scope of the unseen infection spread, social distancing is critical, especially because we don't have enough masks to rely on those.
