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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wonder if the harm reduced by "flattening the curve" is greater than the harm introduced by flattening the global economy...

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Is that to say it's better to be dead than unemployed?

Not meaning to be glib nor overly dramatic. But I thought the whole point is that flattening the curve eases load on hospitals meaning they turn away fewer people, and thus more of them survive. So the question you are asking is: how much is preventable loss of life worth?

death will follow either way, like 2008

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/25/financial-crisis... https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5239 https://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2014/06/12/more-t...

damned if we do, damned if we don't

There have been studies showing that unemployment directly increases mortality here is just one [0].

[0] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448606/

That's interesting, sad, and makes intuitive sense.

But I'm not sure we can take it back and say "we need to allow more people to die from coronavirus so that fewer die from unemployment". Ideally we would want to minimize both.

One day when we have the benefit of hindsight someone will do an analysis on the quality-adjusted life years gained and lost by the different responses to this.

We have ways as a society to make sure an economic downturn doesn't kill anyone. We can't say the same thing about an unchecked pandemic.

Not in the US, but yeah -- societies have safety nets for economic downturns. This also assumes the rest of the world is mostly functioning. A global pandemic that breaks everything everywhere is a different story.

If your house burns down but your neighbors are fine, it's easy to get them to help to pitch in rebuild a little. If everyone's houses are torched then you're on your own...

I get the sentiment, but consider: the economy will recover. Some people exposed to corona virus will not.

Unfortunately it's not clear cut as there is a real human cost to each.

The whole versus the parts. The human species will recover. Some companies will not.

A company can come back from the dead. Humans cannot.

The alternative is letting it widely infect the population leading to 5%+ of symptomatic cases dying (which could be as much as 2% of the overall population) and people being unable to get critical medical attention for any ailments while this is happening. You don't think the economy would shut down in the scenario, if only from upper-middle-class and up individuals quitting their jobs and bunkering down to save their own skins?

Flattening the curve is not an alternative to letting it widely infect the population, it is just managing the rate of infection slightly. The same number end up infected.

That is correct, which is why flattening the curve (as the UK intends to do) is not the optimal response - the optimal response is to contain the virus and prevent it from spreading to most of the population, as South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Singapore have all done. And as Italy is belatedly in the process of accomplishing.

Italy is way too late for that. Also I think you’re a little early declaring victory for China etc.

The UK is giving contradictory signals. Trying to get herd immunity by winter is not flattening the curve to a level remotely manageable.

That’s exactly the controversy in the UK government’s off-piste response to this scenario.

If it pays off, Britain will win handsomely out of this.

That’s one hell of a massive “if”.

In the case of the former, it's the virus that kills people. If deaths occurred by way of the latter, it would be only because the wealthy ruling class refused to pay their fair share (via the subversion of our democracy) to support basic necessities of food, shelter, and health care.

Italy has 24,747 reported cases and 60 million people. That's 0.04% of Italy's population. If we conservatively(?) assume that there are x10 actual patients, then it's still 0.4%.

If, without intervention, 40% of all people may contact coronavirus, then each country is going to be hit x100 worse than where Italy stands now. I doubt there would be a "global economy" to speak of after that.

Flattening the curve is our only hope.

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