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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

> The longer we're locked down, the longer it's going to take for the economy to recover.

The economy would take a serious hit if suddenly millions of people overwhelm the medical system, people collapse in the streets and bodies pile up in and outside of morgues.

There's a weird false dichotomy I keep encountering where people insinuate that we either quarantine and hurt the economy, or we don't quarantine because of the damage it would do to the economy. The economy is going to take a hit no matter what.

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The guy who predicted millions of deaths in the US is walking back his study as we speak: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i.... Dr Birx mentioned the study in today's presser and said the task force is working on the mass serological test to determine the rate of latent, asymptomatic infection. There won't be "millions of deaths", no matter how much CNN would like you to believe otherwise. There will, however, be a few tens of thousands of deaths, and the public needs to be prepared for that. And it's currently not prepared at all.

There is no "the guy", there are only people who understand statistics. If this coronavirus has a similar disease burden as the flu, more than a million people will die, even if we assume that everyone that needs care gets adequate care. Should the healthcare system become overwhelmed, people that need care won't get it, and even more people will die. Should this coronavirus have a higher disease burden than the flu, which the data shows is very possible, even more people will die.

I have never watched CNN in my life.

Read the article.

I did. I am in the US. You should read the tweets from "the guy"[1] that clarifies his statements, and how they're being misinterpreted[2] by people like yourself:

> I think it would be helpful if I cleared up some confusion that has emerged in recent days. Some have interpreted my evidence to a UK parliamentary committee as indicating we have substantially revised our assessments of the potential mortality impact of COVID-19.

> This is not the case. Indeed, if anything, our latest estimates suggest that the virus is slightly more transmissible than we previously thought. Our lethality estimates remain unchanged.

> My evidence to Parliament referred to the deaths we assess might occur in the UK in the presence of the very intensive social distancing and other public health interventions now in place.

> Without those controls, our assessment remains that the UK would see the scale of deaths reported in our study (namely, up to approximately 500 thousand).

[1] https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928

[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-pandemic-n...

It's not "misinterpreted". No self respecting academic will willingly admit to a blunder of this magnitude, so he's just walking it back one bit at a time as the number of the ground go more and more out of alignment with their modeling.

You should also mention the Oxford study also mentioned in the article if you want to maintain some semblance of unbiased opinion: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxmu2rwsnhi9j9c/Draft-COVID-19-Mod...

That study suggests that _because_ the virus is more transmissible, and because most people do not have symptoms, a ton of people had it already without paying much attention. Think about it. If it's so transmissible as the "walked back" estimate suggests, wouldn't the UK, which implemented isolation measures only very recently, and which pretty much _lives_ in the pubs, be very, very fucked right now? And it's not fucked. 162 cases per million, only 163 people in critical condition, 9 deaths per million (flu, for instance, claims 142 people per million in the US), although I'm sure the numbers will go up significantly before they are out of the woods.

Moreover, after restrictions were partially lifted in China and Korea and people were put back to work the epidemic did not restart there. This does not line up at all with the initial "we're all gonna die" rhetoric.

It's possible for you both to be right.

The Professor is correct that his study essentially recommended (and caused) the nationwide house arrest now implemented, and that this is why he's now estimating far fewer deaths.

At the same time I wouldn't pick that study as a hill to die on. It has flaws that are severe and obvious to any layman and probably more that aren't, e.g.

• The assumption of mass deaths was based on constant NHS capacity for a year. That assumption is obviously false, the NHS managed to double ICU capacity within a week or so just by converting wards and now they're building emergency hospitals, China style.

• They used hospitalisation and fatality rates calculated from Italy, although the problems with biased sampling there are well discussed.

• They applied no discount rate learned from prior SARS outbreaks, where the final CFR turned out to be far lower than initial estimates, even though it's clear that the same will happen this time.

• When people asked for their source code the good professor announced it was of such low quality he couldn't release it until Microsoft had rewritten it for him.

• It mixes up excess mortality with incidental mortality. The UK has the same problem as Italy, where deaths that involve COVID-19 are being reported and counted as caused by it (because it's on the 'notifiable diseases' list). A shift in distributions is being reported as deaths that would never have happened otherwise, which isn't the case. And the ICL team know this because the professor blithely stated that of the 20,000 predicted deaths, probably 2/3rds would have happened anyway. Why was this rate not applied in the study given that excess mortality is obviously what people care about?

Right now it's really hard to feel confidence in any epidemiological output. This field feels more like psychology or economics than physics or microbiology.

An article doesn't really mean much in the age of missinformation. You can find articles for whatever opinion you wish to confirm.

330 Mio US citizens

x 70% of them getting infected until herd immunity

x 1% mortality

= 2.31 Mio deaths in the USA

---

if the virus spreads uninhibited the mortality will be way higher.

He's not "walking it back."

https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1243294815200124928

forget the economy. Imagine the practical consequences of letting the virus run wild in the population. The deaths are not an abstract number. It would mean northern Italy in every city. Doctors overwhelmed, patients suffocating on hospital floors. So many corpses you actually have to transport them away on army trucks. That's where Lombardy is right now.

It's a joke to even think society and the economy would go on as normal even if you would ignore the health impact, it would destroy the reputation and fabric of pretty much any modern state.

New York hospitals have already had to bring in refrigerated trailers to store the bodies.

Every single news outlet is showing _the same_ hospital, and the same empty trailer. Notice also what an eye trained for bullshit sees in the video: rows of ventilators that aren't even plugged in, "easy" patients with oxygen cannulas and face masks ("hard" ones would be intubated, sedated, lying prone, and they would be immobilized), empty beds here and there. All the while the narrative is "we're piling up the bodies over here". 13 deaths for a large hospital _do not_ require a mobile crematorium or a trailer refrigerator. At best, you're seeing selection bias. At worst, you're being deliberately lied to, to drive clicks

At double worst, you're being deliberately lied to because the media believe, truly and honestly, that it's their job to manipulate you into believing socially useful things.

Yeah I'm sure they consider blind, raging panic they're trying their hardest to stoke to be "socially useful" somehow.

Well, that part I think they've actually made pretty explicit. The general public isn't taking coronavirus seriously enough (which I agree is true!), so it's their job to try and make the public more scared. Which is really obnoxious to those of us who live in a county that takes it as seriously as possible, let me tell you.

If they want to be "responsible" they need to be preparing the public to 50-60K dead for the year, which would be a normal haul of a heavy flu season. With extraordinary measures already in place (and with selective lifting of the measures in locales where infection is moderate), it seems to me that's where we'll end up. IOW, people who would die of the flu complications, will die of COVID19 and lower respiratory problems instead. Trouble is, nobody pays any attention to how many people die of flu complications per year. That number for lower respiratory diseases, for instance, is 160K per year in the US, without any virus (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929#chronic-low...). So it is possible that _fewer_ people will die of lower respiratory stuff because all the stops are being pulled when caring for them.

As to making people take it seriously, I don't think that's their primary motivation at all. As of yesterday, Cuomo himself admitted that there is a lot of unused ventilator capacity in NY. Meanwhile the press is reporting that they're running out of beds and ventilators, possibly causing people to freak out and leave NY, dragging disease to where it has not yet proliferated. This is extremely irresponsible.

On one hand, it's a harder problem than you're giving it credit for. We're likely to end up with a death toll of a heavy flu season or a bit above, but that's because the country's taking it seriously, building out the required healthcare capacity and taking extreme mitigation measures to make sure there's time to do it. New York has unused ventilator capacity now, and will likely be able to source enough ventilators to keep up even with their peak, but that's only helpful because they've worked at breakneck pace to remove every other obstacle to scaling up the healthcare system.

On the other hand, your last point does reflect a real problem with the media's strategy here. Gross manipulation doesn't allow the media to effectively communicate the subtle distinction between "this is an emergency, we must act urgently or New Yorkers will think they've been hit with the plague" and "our emergency response measures are largely expected to work, it will be tragic but not the end of New York".

I’m getting the sense it’s what HN and perhaps more mainstream groups think too — that people are too weak to defend themselves against intellectual manipulation, and that democracy needs a special helping hand from the intellectual class.

The strong sense of the critique isn't quite fair. It wouldn't be right to call every political activist an elitist, even though they often think people are being intellectually manipulated and always think that democracy needs their special helping hand.

A claimed picture of the bodies inside one of these trailers: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/miriamelder/coronavirus...

What was the hit to the economy from Spanish Flu, that also mostly killed the young? What is the specific serious hit to the real economy that you expect, other that short-term, from "bodies piling up"?

Sure, I agree it's terrible, but the claim about the economy is what's weird.

Also, there are other solutions like serological testing, aggressively developing ways to manage the illness, testing vaccines, etc. It's not just quarantines, folks

It's almost as if the US government does not have a coherent plan. /s

The FDA has started vaccine tests?

14-month trials.

> Also, there are other solutions like serological testing, aggressively developing ways to manage the illness, testing vaccines, etc. It's not just quarantines, folks

Unless we want to completely overwhelm the medical system within the next couple of weeks and potentially have over a million people drop dead from infection or lack of adequate healthcare, quarantine is the one tool we have at our disposal right now to manage this pandemic.

Is the UK really going to have serological testing up and running that quickly?

There are people arguing that it would be better to stop the quarantine now and get it over as quick as possible. Everybody over retirement age would be refused treatment to reduce the long term burden on the social security system.

Fortunately there isn't much serious discussion of this approach outside of certain think tanks because the optics are bad even for true died in the wool libertarians.

You'll even see arguments like "more people will die of the quarantine because they have no job if we keep the economy stopped for much longer".

IMHO this kind of one sided thinking comes from only considering the markets when making a decision. The markets don't care if you live or die, only that money is being made and spent.

> You'll even see arguments like "more people will die of the quarantine because they have no job if we keep the economy stopped for much longer".

There are a few of these arguments in this thread, even.

A plan to refuse treatment to everyone over retirement age has a lot of problems but one of them is that there are a fair number of really tough, armed, and knowledgeable old people out there. I doubt they’d just surrender without a fight.

> A plan to refuse treatment to everyone over retirement age has a lot of problems but one of them is that there are a fair number of really tough, armed, and knowledgeable old people out there.

Are they armed with a vaccine ? Otherwise how would being armed help?

If you sentence everyone over a certain age to death, some of them are likely to decide they have nothing to lose.

They may not be able to compel anyone to treat them, but they can take a few doctors with them out of spite to make sure the rest of us are as screwed as they are.

Oh man. You’re telling everyone over 65, “go fuck yourself, you paid taxes and worked hard to build this country, we don’t care, let this virus kill you”. Some may agree to it, but I’m pretty sure this will cause a lot of havoc on the streets. People killing until they get treated.

Also this virus is a bell curve not a cutoff threshold. It has killed many young people. If you let it run wild , it can even come for you.

The common flu has been us for decades. What if COVID-19 became like the flu. A seasonal thing that evolves a bit every year. Soon there is a time bomb strain that kills 10% of the population but only kicks in after a month.

Something like that could wipe off a billion people from the planet. The only planet we know that can sustain intelligent life.

Sure, but the longer the lockdown, the worse it is for the economy. And it's economy that pays for healthcare, food, housing, etc.

It's not an ideal situation when we eradicate the virus but have millions of people jobless and homeless in the US.

I'm not sure I understand the "bad for the economy" side of things. Who will suffer if we shut down unessential businesses and just mail people checks? We'll still be able to eat, we'll still have roofs over our heads, etc. The only ones who will really see their lives change significantly are the ultra-rich, who need us riding around in Ubers, renting Airbnbs, and buying plane tickets so they can fund their wealthy lifestyles. Who gives a shit about them? The average American is affected less by a quarantine than an unchecked pandemic. The only reason this is even a discussion is because our political system has been completely bought out to serve only the wealthy.

> Who will suffer if we shut down unessential businesses and just mail people checks? We'll still be able to eat, we'll still have roofs over our heads, etc. The only ones who will really see their lives change significantly are the ultra-rich, who need us riding around in Ubers, renting Airbnbs, and buying plane tickets so they can fund their wealthy lifestyles.

Why do you think this to be the case? The ultra-rich don't need you around to do whatever they want. They have their islands and personal staff to attend to them.

When the government bails you out and gives you money, you slowly by slowly become unable to eat, unable to have roofs over your head. Food does not magically appear in a grocery store. Food has a global supply chain that requires your currency to have value. When the government prints money, it makes it harder for it to borrow money in the future. Eventually, your dollar buys less on the global markets, meaning farmers cannot acquire fertilizer and other needed things to grow your crops. We won't be able to hire labor to pick the crops. People will lose their jobs as exports dry up and American dollars buy less and less foreign currency. Eventually, farmers raise their prices to combat all these forces, and the government must print more money. This is just food on the table. Construction materials and workers to put a roof on your head require an even larger, international supply chain. In order to combat this, the government reduces welfare programs and increases taxes. Business and 'the rich' leave for greener pastures. Frankly, inflation kills, and I don't understand why everyone is so dismissive of this.

I'm not even touching inflation's effects on doctors ability to do medicine.

>Food has a global supply chain that requires your currency to have value.

Not true for all food.

> When the government prints money, it makes it harder for it to borrow money in the future.

What causes it to be harder to borrow is the faith of people willing to hold government debt. The American government has never reneged on its debt. "Printing money" has very little to do with the government's ability to borrow.

>Eventually, your dollar buys less on the global markets, meaning farmers cannot acquire fertilizer and other needed things to grow your crops.

We produce these things locally. Every nation-state with a half-decent national security apparatus does.

>People will lose their jobs as exports dry up and American dollars buy less and less foreign currency.

This is one of the most glaring cognitive dissonances in this thought process. Currency is relative. When the American dollar is strong, it means foreign currency buys fewer tangible American goods, and we actually export less. When the American dollar is weak, foreign currency goes farther and we export more.

>When the government bails you out and gives you money, you slowly by slowly become unable to eat, unable to have roofs over your head.

As Alan Greenspan put it when Paul Ryan brought this fanciful line of thinking up in Congress: inflation happens when there are too many dollars chasing too few goods. There are two sides to this equation. Given the difficulty the Fed has had meeting inflation targets, it is far more likely we are constrained by the allocation of dollars either because we are not able to get them where they need to be in the economy, or because there's just too little circulating.

America needs phosphate and imports it currently. We cannot produce enough locally. This is needed to produce enough food. I'm not sure how you get around this in your magical world.

> What causes it to be harder to borrow is the faith of people willing to hold government debt. The American government has never reneged on its debt. "Printing money" has very little to do with the government's ability to borrow.

Yeah, making up money and having people sit at home (thus not paying taxes) is really going to inspire people to hold American debt!

>America needs phosphate and imports it currently.

Sure, right now the economics work out that it's cheaper to import phosphate then produce it locally.

>We cannot produce enough locally.

We might not produce enough locally to meet the current demand right now, but that doesn't mean we can't. It about whether capital is currently allocated toward the production of phosphate. It doesn't need to be because we can import it. If we couldn't produce it under any circumstance that would be a massive national security flaw. :)

> Yeah, making up money and having people sit at home (thus not paying taxes) is really going to inspire people to hold American debt!

Having as many people as we can bear sit at home is the best course of action at the very present moment to avoid spreading this virus. The people sitting at home need to be able to buy what they need and pay the essential workers producing and transporting what they need to them. The alternative is worse: you spread virus and can't pay working people.

People will hold American debt if the American government can assure debt holders that its people and institutions can survive a pandemic.

>... is really going to inspire people to hold American debt!

In the end we agree, it really is about faith :)

> If we couldn't produce it under any circumstance that would be a massive national security flaw. :)

Yeah, it's so much a national security flaw that American law gives American citizens the right to claim islands as parts of the United States in order to secure access to a very difficult to acquire resource.

> Having as many people as we can bear sit at home is the best course of action at the very present moment to avoid spreading this virus.

This is not up for debate, and I never disagreed with it.

> The people sitting at home need to be able to buy what they need and pay the essential workers producing and transporting what they need to them.

Certainly. I wasn't disagreeing with you that people will need compensation for lost income.

However, what we were discussing was this:

The ultra-rich are not going to suffer. They have their own personal capital they will use for their enjoyment. The people who will suffer are the American tax payer (regardless of income) who now has a larger debt burden. At some point, the American tax burden will overshadow the service we pay on debts. Then all faith will be lossed. It may not happen after this bill. It may not happen after 100 of these bills, but it will happen eventually, and it'll not harm the rich, I'll tell you that.

>it'll not harm the rich, I'll tell you that.

Inflation, once it is an actual problem, can be taxed away and we can structure that tax progressively. The rich will pay their fair share.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/16/18251646/modern...

They'll just leave the United States, then?

Why is it 'fair'? They made their money by giving people things they wanted in exchange for money the people were happy to give them. How is taking it back fair?

> They'll just leave the United States, then?

American citizen expatriates pay tax.

>How is taking it back fair?

We live in a society. :)

> They'll just leave the United States, then?

Good, they're leeches on society and add nothing of value. If they added value, they wouldn't pay their workers the bare minimum and list them as contractors so they don't get health insurance. Let's encourage more compassionate corporations to expand their operations, and force greedy corporations out. I think we'll all be better off for it.

> They have their own personal capital they will use for their enjoyment.

Where did they get this capital? I say we take it back from them and use it to buy food. Not that there's a shortage of food. I guess I should say we should take it from them and hand it to Americans so they are allowed to access the food which we have already produced. It's a sad state of things when Americans go hungry solely due to billionaires hoarding wealth on private islands. The food is there, the people who need it are there, but our "economic system" says they're not allowed to access it until a billionaire decides they're good enough to be employed to make them richer.

> Where did they get this capital?

I would assume people gave it to them in exchange for goods that those same people were unwilling to produce?

> It's a sad state of things when Americans go hungry solely due to billionaires hoarding wealth on private islands.

No one is going hungry. People have paid unemployment insurance and will be getting a stimulus check anyway.

> ut our "economic system" says they're not allowed to access it until a billionaire decides they're good enough to be employed to make them richer.

You don't need a billionaire to employ you. Just make something your neighbor wants and charge them for it. I made a small fortune selling tomato starts to my neighbors. Which billionaire employed me? Maybe people should start asking what they can do for others instead of waiting for someone to spell it out for them.

> those same people were unwilling to produce?

Because people just have the option to produce food for themselves right?

> No one is going hungry.

This is just plain false. Many children who relied on school lunches are going hungry as we speak.

> Just make something your neighbor wants and charge them for it.

My neighbor is just as poor as me. We can only afford rent, food, and healthcare (healthcare is a luxury). What are my options now? I have to work as an Uber driver because it's hard to find work around here.

> I made a small fortune selling tomato starts to my neighbors.

That's great, if you live in a rich neighborhood. Unfortunately when I go door to door in wealthy neighborhoods the cops pick me up.

> Because people just have the option to produce food for themselves right?

Are you really arguing that farmers shouldn't charge for the food they grow?

> This is just plain false. Many children who relied on school lunches are going hungry as we speak.

Haven't most states provided a substitute program? Mine certainly has. I'm curious to know which jurisdiction is not.

> My neighbor is just as poor as me. We can only afford rent, food, and healthcare (healthcare is a luxury). What are my options now? I have to work as an Uber driver because it's hard to find work around here.

Then sell to someone with money? I do agree that we systematically prevent poor neighborhoods from access to capital markets, but that is due to burdensome regulation, not greed. I would assume if your hours have been reduced, you should be getting the unemployment insurance you paid for, if not, that's a different story.

> That's great, if you live in a rich neighborhood. Unfortunately when I go door to door in wealthy neighborhoods the cops pick me up.

No. On craigslist. You clearly have internet access and time to post. It's free and people just meet me in parking lots. Paid a few dollars for the seeds, and grew them for two months in my house. People pay ridiculous amounts for heirloom varieties. Seeds are often free if you have a local seed library.

> Are you really arguing that farmers shouldn't charge for the food they grow?

No, I'm saying we shouldn't bail out big corps and banks. We should mail checks to Americans who need to eat instead of relying on big corps to pay them to do so. History has shown time and time again that instead of paying their labourers fairly, big corps will hoard wealth to enrich their VCs and pay out bonuses to execs. Let's go straight to the root of the problem instead of bowing down to our corporate overlords.

> Then sell to someone with money?

Unfortunately I don't have time for this. My family is going to go hungry next week, so I don't have time to build up a new business and flounder for a while.

> I do agree that we systematically prevent poor neighborhoods from access to capital markets, but that is due to burdensome regulation, not greed.

This is where we disagree. It's 100% absolutely due to greed.

> you should be getting the unemployment insurance you paid for

I live paycheck to paycheck, we had to skip 2 meals last week. I can't afford unemployment insurance.

> Paid a few dollars for the seeds, and grew them for two months in my house.

Again, I don't have time to wait for seeds to grow. I don't know how I'm going to feed my children next week, let alone in two months.

Now obviously I'm not the person who is having these problems, I'm just talking like one to show you the flaws in your argument. You're looking at this from the perspective of someone who has an emergency savings fund, and an education, but the stark reality is that 50% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and have no ability to start a business like you're saying. You have to be in a position of extreme privilege to talk this way.

Every American deserves a roof over their head and a hot meal. For some reason we've set up a system where people like Adam von Neumann and the Waltons get to decide which Americans deserve to eat, and which deserve to go hungry. You're saying that's not because of greed? We have the ability to feed every American in this country, but we artificially gate food and housing behind "jobs," then ensure that those big corps get huge bailouts under the guise of protecting workers.

If we want to protect workers, we can just mail them checks. No need to go through big corps, except for corrupt reasons like enriching VCs, lobbyists, and execs.

This is entirely incorrect

The ultra-rich will have a variable level of "decreased performance in their portfolio". They're still rich, especially if not over-levered. They are also well positioned to take advantage of any hyper-inflation event.

The average american, with the loss of their primary income and no real UBI is going to feel it the most.

For the USD to hyperinflate, we would have to print quadrillions and quintillions of dollars.

Hyperinflation is about as real a threat as Bigfoot, or little green men from mars.

> The only ones who will really see their lives change significantly are the ultra-rich, who need us riding around in Ubers, renting Airbnbs, and buying plane tickets so they can fund their wealthy lifestyles.

[citation needed]

The wealthy's assets require hired labor to keep and increase their value. Their wealth is derived from those assets.

There's lots of hired labor around the world, no one needs to live in the united states. That is not actually a requirement to be rich.

In a world where people's identities have become hopelessly conflated with their occupation, preventing them from working for a prolonged period would seem like a pretty major change to their lives. I'm talking about working-class folks here, not the ultra-rich.

Life isn't just about having money to buy food.

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