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Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what would lead to more death and disease overall: shutting down retails sales, or trying to keep it running?

For really basic goods and services: production and sales of food, fuel, electricity, healthcare, etc., it's easy to imagine the health impact of a prolonged interruption.

But what about less urgent categories, such as building construction, automobile manufacturing, restaurants, and tourism? Is it possible that a prolonged reduction in economic activity from those sectors would have a major impact on public health?

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It's certainly an incredibly complex multifaceted issue. It would be interesting with the correct data to model the infection rate and mortality rate.

As a back of the envelop calculation from someone who doesn't do epidemiological modeling, the US has ~330M people. The flu itself infects 5-20% of the population from what I read so let's say this virus infects a conservative 3%, we're at 9.9M.

Based on the data I'm seeing, mortality rate is higher than 3% but there's a lot of factors that go into that (so who knows), so were at just shy of 300k deaths. I think those are conservative figures, personally. My guess is the transmission rate and mortality rates are both higher but there are again so many unknowns.

https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/01/23/coronavirus-outbreak-mapping-...

The mortality rate, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, may be far lower than 1% as we’ve been discovering lots of mild cases.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

I think it’s more and more looking like the mortality rate is lower than initially predicted due to massive underreporting of asympomatic/mild cases. Looking at the Diamond Princess there are (so far) 6 deaths out of 700+ cases in a population skewed towards risk groups.

So assuming 40% of the world gets it, and 1% mortality that's about 30,120,000 dead.

If it's 70% of the world gets it approximately 52,710,000 dead

however, I think once we're at 40% of the population having it I would expect things to go worse because that is a lot of people overloading the health system.

Ehh, nature, she always drags some series into the mix - the mortality rate is a function of distribution across age and other health factors - it doesn't seem to drive the immune system bonkers, so WHO is calling out higher risks to older people, esp those with additional factors such as cardiac or pulmonary impairment. Probably due to the fact this is fundamentally a respiratory issue. Abstractly, more data always helps in spite of the cost to get it, but for us in the USA, the last official action has been to delete the tests_administered count from daily CDC reporting. So that makes any projection more guesswork than not.

Mortality rate is almost certainly lower, actually. 3% is already on the high end of the high estimates I've been hearing, which were 2%. This article says 1%: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/worse-than-the...

"If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate."

With treatment. 10-20% of patients end up requiring intensive medical support, including mechanical ventilation. Will they recieve it? It's more contagious than the Spanish Flu. There simply aren't enough ICU beds - let alone ones equipped to isolate highly contagious disease.

Exactly. Panic and overreaction also has a real cost:

People lose their jobs, their homes, and their healthcare.

True. But we seem so fixated on avoiding any economic downturn that we prioritize the short term over the long term. Wouldn’t it make sense to take a hit in the short term and try more aggressively to slow the spread of coronavirus, for instance, than to react as it becomes a pandemic? Unless we think that containment was always destined to fail with this particular virus.

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