Coronavirus - Reason Government Acted To Implement Social Distancing

The UK government changed tack this week and dramatically took measures that will massively impact the lives of the population. The paper produced by Imperial College seems to have been critical to this decision and there are some scary details in it. The final paragraph sums up in this way:

A minimum policy for effective suppression is therefore population-wide social distancing combined with home isolation of cases and school and university closure. 

The graph below shows the deaths over time with a peak in June. For the UK it predicts 510,000 deaths if no action is taken. Interestingly it doesn't account for other deaths due to lack of health service capacity so there will be more on top of this where critically ill patients cannot get an intensive care bed say if they've had a heart attack or car crash.

Another quote from the report:

For an uncontrolled epidemic, we predict critical care bed capacity would be exceeded as early as the second week in April, with an eventual peak in ICU or critical care bed demand that is over 30 times greater than the maximum supply in both countries 

The report goes on to explain various different intervention strategies that could reduce this death toll.

The effect of these strategies is then shown in a graph. The important line to look at is the red one - the available bed capacity and then where the other lines go above it.

Only with a full range of measures (green line) does the bed capacity actually meet demand. Even with the current restrictions the capacity will be exceeded in May. Once schools are closed then there is a chance to keep it below.

It's not very clear on the graph but the blue highlighted section shows he period of time that the restrictions need to be active for. If the numbers match those predicted by the model then it will be September before they are lifted