The health system is more of a non-linear system with many different variables that are dominant in many difficult scenarios.

It is difficult to find the correct response to an exponential or potentially-exponential event. If you go draconian before the “knee” in the curve, it looks like overreaction to a nothing-burger. If you hit after knee, you could easily get 10x or 100x the fatalities you might otherwise have gotten. Add in the long asymptomatic infectious period, and you are working with badly out of date data.

In terms of govt response, facilitating drive-through testing, closing borders, encouraging social distancing, seems correct at this point in the curve. martial law with jail time (like Italy) does not seem correct, perhaps ever for this country. I am very impressed with the response from sports leagues, which made it inevitable that schools, libraries and other public facilities would close.

It was reasonable to make 40-70% infected population estimates before we understood the details of this specific disease and how our societies would behave during an epidemic but the learning phase is over. The data is imperfect but it’s good enough, in the engineering sense, to decide a strategy and a set of tactics given our current resources.

Our social systems collapse long before the infected population reaches an immunity level that has any impact on limiting further outbreaks. The bell curve is very shallow, relative to the total poulation, when it exceeds health system capacity and forces the economy into total lock down.

We will be facing a never ending series of shallow sinusoidal bell curves until we learn to focus on the newly ill and calmly backtrace their previous contacts with an emphasis on the time since first symptoms appeared or 5-14 days if you treat every infected person like a Byzantine General.

Also, all those pandemic and zombie horror movies have done a lot of unrecognized pubic education.

I am more concerned that a large majority of people have stumbling block psychological trouble thinking in terms of the prudence and desirability of active measures that, while they are certain to cause a lot of gross harm, are the lesser evil and reduce net harm, and yield a superior outcome to the passive harm counterfactual.

This is also something I would have thought Hollywood would have educated the public about, excruciating hard-call “least worst option” decisions of this nature being the running theme of shows like “24”, but apparently not.

Tragedy of the Commons, shortages, and hoarding are all solved by property rights and flexible prices. Is hospital capacity an exception?

Yes, hospital capacity is an exception as are seatbelt laws and speed limits. These are cases where we have to rely on empirical data to make optimal decisions in the aggregate. I think what is common in these cases is a lack of a feedback loop that matches our natural institutional memory.

Related, on the collective interest of not overloading the health system, although many have pointed out such interest, I have yet to read anyone explain how such interest has arisen. There are very few, if any, other goods/services where we have somehow developed a collective interest in preventing demand spikes. Why? Is it because there is no market for reserving hospital/ICU/ventillator capacity in the event of an outbreak? Such a market, if it existed, would seem to allow us to rely on individual interest to get people to socially distance rather than on exhortations to consider collective interests. Tragedy of the Commons, shortages, and hoarding are all solved by property rights and flexible prices. Is hospital capacity an exception? Also, has regulatory capture in some way prevented emergence of health care innovations to allow for more flexible capacity to meet demand spikes? These are questions about how our healthcare system should evolve in the long term. In the present crisis, we have to deal with the healthcare system that we actually have. Somehow, though, I don’t get the sense that this pandemic — and the heavily regulated healthcare system’s inability to deal with it without resorting to calls for collective action — is priming us to consider market-based reforms in the future. That would be truly immoral and unethical.