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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a much worse outcome than just taking the virus on the chin and letting 40-70% of the population get sick. That may seem contrarian, but this panic feels worse than the actual virus. More people will die from economic hardship than from COVID.

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The problem with that strategy is that some percentage of the people who become sick need acute care or they will die, and acute care is effectively a fixed resource over short time frames. There are a limited number of hospital beds, ventilators, nurses, doctors, and support staff available. The disease can spread much faster than you can increase any of these resources. If you run out of hospital capacity the death rate will increase rapidly and substantially. No government will fail to act when there are literally bodies piling up on the sidewalks outside of hospitals, so it is much saner to act to divert that scenario.

> this panic feels worse

Well, for most people losing their family would feel way worse.

There are many ways to mitigate the economic impact down the line. Governments at all levels, companies and organization are already helping blunt the impact. For example, the California state government has promised to keep paying teachers and school staff. Many tech companies are continuing to pay maintenance staff despite office closures. NBA players have donated to arena staff affected by cancellations.

But nothing can bring back our loved ones.

Sources: https://edsource.org/2020/newsom-assures-districts-theyll-be.... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/coronavirus-google-facebook-.... https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/us/nba-player-donations-coron....

Letting 40-70% of the population being infected by a virus with 2% percent of mortality rate mean the death of 1% of the population. And probably even more because hospital beds will be saturated and won't be able to provide the cure they need to many people.

(for perspective the normal moratlity rate is 0.77% in a normal population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate)

I guess people would rather lower the gdp than have their parents die.

Destroying the economy at this rate will bring much more death than Corona. 10s of thousands of businesses are being crippled. The government will do nothing aside from bailing out institutions they’ve bailed out countless times before. Leaving the lower and middle class absolutely gutted.

People presumably still want the recession form of death than the pandemic one, it's not even a competition. There is no amount of evidence you can present to the public that would make this call even a close one. "ten times as many will die from the recession unless we let X people die now" doesn't work.

Rather an economic crisis than losing some of your loved ones a decade or two before their time. Get the authorities in place to be the safety net and take the measures required. Preventing a major GDP bump downwards is not worth millions of lives.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

The argument about economic effects vs. health effects is getting nastier and could get a lot worse. Please find ways to make your substantive points that don't nudge HN threads in that direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're talking about conceivably millions in the U.S. alone.

55% * 6% fatality rate * 330 million is >10,000,000.

That's a lot of people to sacrifice to keep bars and restaurants open.

6% where are you getting that number? The highest I’ve seen is 3% and that’s in people older than 80...

In countries having overwhelmed healthcare systems, most recently: Italy, the rate is much higher than the 3.4% estimated by the WHO. It’s still too early to say what the actual figure will turn out to be in Italy, but 6% was the raw result from 13 March.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

So our best sets of data are the WHO analysis of Wuhan which puts it at 5.6%. And the diamond princess which gives us a 1% fatality rate. But here's the big catch, those infected on the Diamond Princess got all of the medical care they needed.

And the issue is once our healthcare system gets overwhelmed the rate will shift from 1% up to the 5.6% (And Wuhan could have gotten much worse)

Also, South Korea was around 1%. It's a number that has grown in credibility, unfortunately. I was hoping 0.1%.

It's awful when you consider that losing 1% of the population is the best case scenario.

You're assuming that none of them would die if you keep bars and restaurants closed. There's no indication that this measure is effective at all.

That's true, I was mostly just trying to illustrate the size of the problem we're dealing with. I think our best bet is to slow it down as much as possible. And we're not going to get randomized controlled trials on a lot of the interventions we take, just our medical community's best guess at what will work.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry I assumed op was underestimating the mortality rate(which is easy to do if you just look at the mortality rates without digging into the overwhelmed vs not overwhelmed rates), not that he didn't care about human lives.

I think many people think that if we don't strongly mitigate/contain the virus the deaths are measured in 10's of thousands which would need more careful consideration of the downstream effects of closing off a part of our economy.

Looking at my comment the restaurants and bars could sound flippant but I posted that before the thread turned nasty so I wasn't as careful with my words as I would have been had I known this was a contentious subject.

I wish the tone in my head when I wrote the comment came through, I'll try to be more careful in the future, especially regarding this subject. Just sometimes the tone of a comment sounds very different in your head then how it might read.

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