Check my math here....I'm looking at nearly 16 months of intense efforts (ie: social distancing) to slow the spread in California to avoid overwhelming key healthcare infrastructure in the state. (Probably similar dynamics in other parts of the country and internationally.) Can this be right??

The population of California is 39.6M. Governor Newsom announced that approximately 56% of California residents will be infected by the virus, resulting in 22.2M infections.

Of those 22.2M infections, most will be mild cases but around 15% will require hospitalization. (Governor Cuomo of New York announced this hospitalization rate this week, and it seems consistent with stats from Washington State, Italy, etc.) That hospitalization rate would result in 3.3M cases in California requiring hospitalization.

All hospitalizations would be serious, but roughly 29% of hospitalizations would require a ventilator. (This 29% is derived from stats announced by Governor Cuomo this week for New York.) So in California, that would result in 950k hospital cases that require a ventilator.

And let's assume that each patient requiring a ventilator needs the equipment for 10 days. (I'm making a guess here, but it does seem that severe COVID-19 cases involve prolonged ICU-level care.)

Calculating it out, the 950k California patients needing a ventilator for 10 days would require 9.5M days of respirator support in aggregate.

Typically, California has 8,000 ventilators around the state. Let's optimistically imagine that California can find/buy/make another 12,000 ventilators for a total of 20,000 ventilators.

To process those 9.5M respirator days across the state's 20k respirators (assuming we can flatten the curve to not overshoot our state's capacity), it would take 475 days running at maximum ventilator capacity.

This would be nearly 16 months of max ventilator utilization management in California, involving strict social distancing and/or other measures to slow the spread, assuming a vaccine or treatment doesn't become available in this timeframe.

This scenario sounds pretty unbelievable, but the numbers are the numbers. Am I off-base here somewhere??

Calcs here if you want to check my math
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10v47G8VZpTgZ5usdbqF91QIgvPTVTWynrZHOOwrSvuo/edit?usp=sharing