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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

It's not "death fast", it's: 1) way more deaths and a complete congestion of medical services vs. 2) less deaths, manageable medical service and a period of painful stagnation for the economy.

If you get critically sick or injured (not COVID19 related) and hospitals are overflowing, you will suffer when no one can see you because of COVID19 cases.

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And the problem is that during an extended period of curve reduction there will still be people pushed out of medical care due to surging cases (but not spiking!). The total area between the number of patients and hospital capacity curves may be similar in both cases.

This also assumes an invariant capacity. Extended period gives us the opportunity increase that capacity through means including getting folks trained as hospital techs (4 week training) and having local teams sew & build our filters and masks.

Essentially given a will, we could transition part of our economy to a war footing (against the virus). Do we have the will?

Or do we capitulate and decimate the population?

Why not move to a system where those most likely to live with minimal resource consumption move up? You’d probably need a multiplier for those that are useful to society but need more resources

That sounds an awful lot like a romanticized perfect democracy, which cannot exist outside of fiction, or a social credit system. There's an ongoing study on the effectiveness of a social credit system. It's happening in China. Go test it out and report back.

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