It's still a good strategy for right now because it gives us some extra time to ramp testing and healthcare up.
This is difficult, not impossible. We'll see what actually happens.
https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-dea...
If things had gone slightly differently, it's entirely possible that we'd be pointing at Italy as an example of successful containment that South Korea should have followed. They tested and contact-traced and thought they were doing quite well for the first 30 or so cases too, but reality hit them once it was far too late to do anything.
For something with a long incubation period and potentially mild symptoms (ie, infected might not go to a hospital) only widespread statistical sampling will give a reliable picture of what is happening.
When I heard countries talking about 'testing criteria' that involved travel - I think this was in mid/late February - it seemed inevitable that things were going to drift out of control. There was no way that would pick up the mild inbound cases that could spread to become clusters. It probably developed that way because actual monitoring programs were infeasible but it'd be nice to know.
This illustrates the challenge with tracing approaches: if people are not open, or not sufficiently aware of the consequences of their actions, it's very easy to miss infections.
If that was long enough ago to become part of a biography, it must be even more possible these days to get cameras and connectivity to remote hospitals anywhere on Earth with spare capacity of nurses.
But hey, without the flattening, the number of dead will be a shitton, and they will come fast. Probably causing social panic. With the flattening (but still not enough capacity), there will be a few deaths a day but no "Holy fuck a whole Titanic's worth of people died today"...
I would assume that under that scenario, the backlog would disappear shortly after the 2-year mark.
