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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Spreading them out is hugely important if hospital beds and other available healthcare resources are in short supply, though.

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This is actually a good point. The mortality rate for the coronavirus is lower if ventilators or supplemental oxygen are available. But we have limited numbers of ventilators.

So if we can blunt the peak infection rate, more people will survive, even if the total number of cases is the same.

There’s a brilliant animated gif that explains this visually

https://twitter.com/SiouxsieW/status/1236721200291655680

Looks like it's also not entirely correct in what it wants to convey. If assumption is that having overall amount of cases under health care capability threshold lowers total amount of deaths then area of the second chart should be much smaller. Now they look approximately equal, which means overburden health care system or not, it didn't make a difference.

You sure about that? An overburdened health care system will cause people to die that otherwise would not have. A patient, for example, who needs a ventilator for some condition other than COVID-19, but can’t get one. These are not reflected in the area under the curve.

Yep, you're right, it's more for a total deaths chart. But I would expect it to be visible even in total cases chart, since less people should be out on the streets spreading the disease.

This article is about death rates, not infections rates. Spreading out deaths does not have similar benefits.

But hurts all the small businesses and people who are laid off due to prolonged closings.

This is where the government should step in with stimulus and direct aid.

Absolutely. Many economical government interventions have terrible unintended consequences due to creating bad incentives, but one time fixes for emergencies completely outside of the domain of the businesses in question do not have that drawback. Nobody would structure their business for maximum pandemic bailout.

PS (edit): oh, and it also wouldn't really keep businesses from preparing for a pandemic, because of pandemics strike one once in several decades this will be long enough for market forces to have preparing companies displaced by those who don't. The market favors the optimist who bets on no pandemic happening in their lifetimes.

If you want to be any more direct why not just sacrifice old people on an altar to mammon?

You suggest we send them to their god?

A collapsing healthcare system doesn't?

People shouldn't mock your concern.

Economic declines cause very real harm to real people -- mostly the working poor.

People lose their jobs, their houses, and their healthcare in recessions.

You may feel immune if you're a tech worker -- and you may be for a time -- but you're not immune to layoffs either.

Beat me to it. If this gets bad there's going to be a global recession and associated political unrest on top of the actual toll of the pandemic.

Oil just dropped 30% and the virus is just getting started. It's looking likely.

I suspect that at some point the risks from economic harms will outweigh health concerns. I'm not sure exactly what that will mean but I don't think we can assume the world and its controlling elites will sit by as we roll back to the stone age, regardless of the health outcome.

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