Yeah...... damn that flag is going to get worn out...  You know which flag it is, right?

A supervisor urged surgeons at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan to volunteer for the front lines because half the intensive-care staff had already been sickened by coronavirus.

“ICU is EXPLODING,” she wrote in an email.

A doctor at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan described the unnerving experience of walking daily past an intubated, critically ill colleague in her 30s, wondering who would be next.

Another doctor at a major New York City hospital described it as “a petri dish,” where more than 200 workers had fallen sick.

Where do all these essential workers go when their shift is over?

Do they stay in the hospital and self-quarantine?

Nope.  They go home.

So do their other colleagues, who are likely silently positive with mild or non-symptomatic cases.

Does the Sheriff threaten to arrest them if they leave their house?  Nope.

Why not?  They just had contact with dozens, even hundreds of known-positive people.

What was I saying the other day about why, despite the lockdowns, the R0 is not below 1.0 when the majority of our society has reduced their interaction with others by 90, 95 or even 99%?

Gee, I wonder why there are any community transmissions at all?

If you lock down an area and close all the bars, restaurants and other social places and R0 started as 3.0 it goes under 1.0 instantly and the case rate collapses.  If that does not happen then that is not how it's being spread.

Period.

So the spread wouldn't be coming from all the folks in the hospital who are not being forced to stay in said hospital where the infection would be contained, right?  Could you even do that without every single staff member quitting on the spot?  Probably not.  But even if sick they're considered essential and thus are not subject to actual quarantine orders or arrest for going out in public even if suspected or known positive, never mind that every single one of them had contact with dozens if not hundreds of known-positive persons in the same building.

Meanwhile the rest of us have guns shoved in our faces when the data says we're not the largest component of the vector.

The health care workers are.

The biggest impact of the lockdowns is destroying the ability to pay for hospitals, which is likely to kill more people from all manner of other causes.  I remind you that between heart attacks and strokes there are roughly 1.5 million Americans hit a year and if we destroy the hospital systems by trashing both economic activity and taxation you're very likely to kill far more people who have those events than the virus ever could.

Today, Typhoid Mary is paraded around as a hero.

Psst - Heh Doc, wash your fucking hands.  You want to know how Singapore stopped their health care workers from getting the virus with nearly 100% efficacy and thus removed this vector from the equation?  It wasn't masks or being kitted up in tyvec (entirely impractical for a full shift) -- it was washing their hands before and after each and every contact with a potentially infected person or thing.  Every time.  As soon as they enforced that even if you were chatting with another staffer in a hall without a mask on the infection rate among their health care workers went to a statistical zero.

Oh, want to know when the community transmission rate will start to drop in a given area?  When all the docs, nurses and other medical workers have been infected and either resolved or died.  They then are immune and their spreading of the virus into the community stops.  That, by the way, is why despite the lockdowns, there is no effect for a couple of weeks instead of one viral generation time after the lockdown occurs -- the spreading continues until you run out of vulnerable health care workers who can spread it into the community.

THEN it stops.

And yes, that's exactly the pattern we're seeing.  Community spread from ordinary social interaction isn't the largest component of the total in the vectors of transmission.  The health care system workers are, which is why the anomalous pattern that we keep seeing in every single nation and area, where there is one case here and there in a given area and then suddenly the case count explodes upward.  One or a few of those cases are go sideways, wind up in the hospital and then the entire staff gets it and spreads it back out in an exponential blast into the community.

PS: This same pattern was visible in Wuhan.