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Comment by milansm | Hacker News Reader

But how can anybody be sure that conservative policy (lockdown, I assume) would work for UK (or any other nation beside China)? They probably have to factor in the chance of success. They can fail in implementing conservative option (which might not be so conservative after all), and ruin the economy as a side effect. I imagine this as a choice between these: - long struggle with uncertain outcome in terms of life lost but with certain economic ruin - short struggle with uncertain outcome in terms of life lost, with small economic ruin

I’m neither epidemiologist nor politician in power, so I can entertain myself with these thought experiments. In the end, I have little choice (and knowledge or firepower), but to do as instructed by local authorities.

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The economy is a tool to get people goods and services. It is less important than life & death on a mass scale. 0.1% to 1% of the population unexpectedly dying is huge.

If the government was implementing a plan that they had considered and prepared over a number of years, carefully assessed the evidence and weighed the options? Costs and benefits have been weighed and it is hard to ask for more.

Government has no idea what is happening and it decides to go in and see how bad it is? Not a great time to prioritise the non-essential parts of the economy.

I agree with what you just wrote. But, the premise is wrong, I think; We don’t know if lockdown now vs lockdown later (in UK’s case) will result with 0.1% vs 1% of life lost, respectively.

COVID-19 is rapidly becoming the centre of attention for the entire global medical community and every government on the planet. It threatens the wealth of billionaires and the power of the powerful. I have a remarkable amount of faith that progress on treatments and medical practices will be swift and impressive.

Delaying the pain by a month or two could well be an extremely good move.

You're betting on 1) a therapy being found in that interval, 2) that therapy being highly effective (no significant side effects), 3) easily available 4) affordable 5) you still have medical personnel with which to apply it.

I wouldn't take those odds.

One more, by the way: that the virus doesn’t mutate.

Let's do math!

I'll use US numbers, because I know them.

The current worst case scenarios on the table are between 1% and 5% of the individuals catching the disease dying (there are better numbers, but we're worst casing it). For achieving herd immunity, numbers like 40-70% of the population infected and recovered are bandied about.

So worst case, you're looking at 1.3-11.6 million deaths in the US.

Now, the US government values the lives of its citizens at $7-9 million dollars a piece.

That puts the economic cost of this strategy, in the US, at $9.1-104 trillion dollars.

That dwarfs what is happening in the stock market right now; shutting down the entire US economy for a year makes sense when faced with that magnitude of potential loss.

I assume the math is similar elsewhere.

I don’t understand how we can have reliable mortality/morbidity statistics when it’s only been out for a few months, and many people that get it don’t even get diagnosed with it and so aren’t counted in the survivors. How can there be a representative sample of data available yet?

We work with what we have, and update as more information becomes known.

At the very least, we have a current floor that 0.002% of the total Italian population has died from the disease so far; conversely, we know a minimum of 21,157 have contracted it in the same population, and 1,966 have recovered, so the mortality rate is probably less than 90%.

Now those two numbers are very far apart, so you might be inclined to wait and see whether the final number will lie, but the problem with that is, once the final number is known, it is too late to act.

We either have the option of acting now, as seems best with our current information, and correcting course as the new information reveals itself, or doing nothing at all, and waiting for better information, and our current information says that doing nothing at all is not the best option.

> Now, the US government values the lives of its citizens at $7-9 million dollars a piece.

Wait, where does that figure come from?

I mean, honestly it varies department to department, and when you start talking "lives" versus "YoQL": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States

> The current worst case scenarios on the table are between 1% and 5% of the individuals catching the disease dying (there are better numbers, but we're worst casing it). For achieving herd immunity, numbers like 40-70% of the population infected and recovered are bandied about.

Yes, those numbers apply if it spreads indiscriminately throughout your entire population.

But we know the virus is here, we know who is in the risk group, which means that if you isolate and self-quarantine people in the risk group, and let the virus slowly roll through the rest of the population, you will get a much lower death rate.

There's a ton of variables that determine the death rate, and yet everyone is just staring themselves blind at the first best numbers we have. No. Come on. It depends on the quality of the care available, it depends on the knowledge of doctors who have experience with it, but most importantly it depends on the demographics of the people who get infected.

> shutting down the entire US economy for a year makes sense

Except "the economy" is made up of millions of individuals. Some will still have an ok quality of life, but many people won't. They'll be fired, or their companies will have gone bankrupt, they'll have no money, no food.. Then what? Do you think hungry people won't food riot just because there's a quarantine? Or go stir crazy? Or ignore it? Or spread propaganda that the entire thing is a hoax so that the New World Order can take over?

> Some will still have an ok quality of life, but many people won't. They'll be fired, or their companies will have gone bankrupt, they'll have no money, no food.. Then what?

The point isn't to actually shut down the entire economy.

The point is that when you are talking loss numbers in the trillions, interventions that cost hundreds of billions or even "smaller numbers of trillions" to avert the big losses make economic sense; helicopter dropping a trillion dollars to allow people besides tech workers to self-isolate and socially distance themselves for a few months could be cheap, in the long run.

> The point is that when you are talking loss numbers in the trillions

The main part of my argument above is that you pulled that number out of your ass, you didn't address any of my points against why that number is baseless, yet you continue using the number.

Your number is a worst-case "cost" of doing absolutely nothing and just letting people die, and then you say that your suggested strategy of dumping cash on the population is much cheaper. While true in itself, the error is that you're equating the UK strategy with the worst-case doing-nothing strategy, and that therefore your strategy is better.

The case for the UK strategy is that by letting the virus spread uncontrolled through the not at risk population, health care systems won't ever be overwhelmed, death rates will be much, much lower than current measured ones, and you'll emerge on the other side with a herd immune population, without doing too much damage to your economy, and the at-risk population won't ever get infected in the first place. And by doing that, the total death toll will be lower, than having the virus slowly go through the entire population, at-risk or not.

>letting the virus spread uncontrolled through the not at risk population

Sounds excellent. Did we remember to tell the virus?

Or at the very least, to divide the UK into two non-interacting populations of at-risk and not-at-risk individuals?

> 0.1% to 1% of the population unexpectedly dying is huge.

A lot of people seem to be focusing on mortality rate, but data from China and Italy show that people who get severe symptoms, but survive COVID-19 will live with lifelong scares, that make them vulnerable for say the next flu season.

So while 0.1-1% may die, we are talking about upwards of 10% of people being put out of commission. It's also wrong to say that younger people aren't hurt by this, there are plenty of young people with chronic illnesses, and limited immune systems. And even if they do survive, it may not be worth living.

This is pretty scary. Not only do SARS cause scarring which decrease quality of life, we are on our 3rd ARDS-causing outbreak in the past 2 decades. So potentially tens of millions worldwide with lifelong lung damage and huge risk of getting taken out in the next round.

do you mind sharing some sources regarding the long term effect of covid-19? i am worried about it, especially since i haven't heard much about it so far (might be too early to tell). thanks.

Not OP, but I remember reading about this. The summary was it's too early to establish long term damage. The scarring is present, but its bound to be on patient who recovered a mere few weeks ago.

> The economy is a tool to get people goods and services. It is less important than life & death on a mass scale.

It's not as simple. GDP per capita is strongly correlated with life expectancy. In other words, people die sooner with worse economy.

or die _even sooner_ with this herd immunity strat.

On an individual level, i would not want this, even if it's "better" for the UK in the long run. As an individual, it's unacceptable for me to take this sort of risk, and i would not agree to it if i had a choice.

> The economy is a tool to get people goods and services. It is less important than life & death on a mass scale.

This just isn’t true. The definition of an economy is a system to determine the production and allocation of scarce resources.

To the extent that those resources include food, shelter, and other elements required to stay alive then the economy literally is the determinant of life and death.

Furthermore, significant contractions of economic activity cause death in measurable predictable ways.

All of this closing down of the economy is — literally — killing people as we speak.

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