Report: Radical restrictions for 12-18 months could be ‘the only viable strategy’
When Jason Christie, chief of pulmonary medicine at Penn Medicine, got projections on how many coronavirus patients might soon be flocking to his Philadelphia hospital, he said he felt physically ill.
“My front-line providers — we were speaking about it in the situation report that night, and their voices cracked,” Christie said on Wednesday. They saw how quickly the surge would overwhelm the system, forcing doctors to make impossible choices — which patients would get ventilators and beds, and which would die.
“They were terrified. And that was the best-case scenario.”
Experts around the country have been churning out model after model — marshaling every tool from math, medicine, science and history — to try to predict the coming chaos unleashed by the new coronavirus and to make preparations.