> I know the generalized idea is no face masks if you don't have symptoms, but if we all used them it might have a good effect on curving the spread.
There was never enough for everybody. So second best option is, known infected + healthcare. Health professionals work under heavy viral load, which is positively correlated with your chance of getting sick and having a bad outcome. Which means in an overloaded healthcare system without adequate amounts of PPE (like Italy now), doctors will be dying, even if they were young and otherwise healthy. And dying doctors drops the system capacity too.
(Capacity of most healthcare systems seems to be limited by the amount of beds and ventilators available, but these you can always make - and China is indeed making them full-steam, to help the rest of the world. You can't make new doctors that quickly, and there isn't much of them either.)
There was never enough for everybody. So second best option is, known infected + healthcare. Health professionals work under heavy viral load, which is positively correlated with your chance of getting sick and having a bad outcome. Which means in an overloaded healthcare system without adequate amounts of PPE (like Italy now), doctors will be dying, even if they were young and otherwise healthy. And dying doctors drops the system capacity too.
(Capacity of most healthcare systems seems to be limited by the amount of beds and ventilators available, but these you can always make - and China is indeed making them full-steam, to help the rest of the world. You can't make new doctors that quickly, and there isn't much of them either.)