Take a deep breath, and then read this report out of Imperial College London which is very sobering but not alarmist, although it confirms, regretfully, some of my worries on an earlier thread. I'll quote from the report and then add a few entirely personal recollections afterwards, although perhaps they will resonate with those of some readers of the right age. Comments are open for those with knowledge and perspective to add their own observations, links etc. From the new report:
Two fundamental strategies are possible: (a) mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread – reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection, and (b) suppression, which aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely. Each policy has major challenges. We find that that optimal mitigation policies (combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease) might reduce peak healthcare demand by 2/3 and deaths by half. However, the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over. For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option.
We show that in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures, though it should be recognised that such closures may have negative impacts on health systems due to increased absenteeism. The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed. We show that intermittent social distancing – triggered by trends in disease surveillance – may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound. Last, while experience in China and now South Korea show that suppression is possible in the short term, it remains to be seen whether it is possible long-term, and whether the social and economic costs of the interventions adopted thus far can be reduced.
In short, it won't be "business as usual" (in universities or elsewhere) by next fall, barring some dramatic development in treatments or some other unexpected events. We may be living in the "new normal" for a year or more.
But let's put this in a bit of context. My mother's mother, Helen Foy, who was born in 1903 and died in early 1993, lost three of her older siblings to the Spanish flu more than a century ago: they were all in their late teens or early 20s as I recall. They grew up in what Grandma Helen always called "the Pennsylvania Dutch" country (where the Amish still live, although the Leinart family(Helen's maiden name) was not Amish; you can see some of her paintings here.) Despite the rural setting, she still lost three of her six or seven siblings during that awful time. Her mother died in the early 1920s, "from a broken heart" as Grandma Helen would always say when recounting these tragic events. Our new pandemic, fortunately, mostly spares the young, a fact not lost I'm sure on all parents. The fatality rate of the new pandemic is also lower than Spanish flu, most of whose victims died ultimately of bacterial infections that could not be treated. If the cost of avoiding the kinds of horrific losses Grandma Helen's family suffered a century ago are "social distancing," telecommuting where possible, and cancelled trips and public events, they are costs I hope we can all bear.
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