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Comment by dannykwells | Hacker News Reader

This is conservative, but also, this is happening in a very short time frame, AND is taking into account all of the social distancing AND is happening at the same time as flu.

Without the distancing measures we have in place we would be looking at millions of deaths.

Once this is over, it will be very tempting to say, "Look it was only as bad as flu, we shouldn't have trashed the economy just for that..." but that of course is not fair reasoning. We only will have 200k deaths because of the distancing.

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But social distancing can make at most order of magnitude difference (generous, semi-arbitrary) - which is still way too small change, it just spreads a lot of deaths in time, doesn't stop all of them, right?

Spreading out cases over time means what might have been a death in a crowded, overworked hospital is a recovery in a moderately challenged hospital where the concerns are fresh face masks rather than available hands.

I know and I don't argue that. I gave 10x less deaths for that, which is generous - but that still means deaths counted in millions.

Wrong. Flattening the curve merely delays infections and does not prevent them. It doesn't seem to work well either. It has been good for a 0.5 R-0 drop which points to other primary vectors instead of aerosols. Also it turns out if you need a ventilator you have a 95% death rate, so if the hospitals get overwhelmed the overall death toll won't be too different. If the death toll is anywhere near 100k total we trashed the economy over a bad flu. It would take 6+ months of isolation to beat the virus with quarantine measures, more than long enough to cause a wave of economic related deaths way higher than the virus. People have to get back to work.

No, you are wrong by confusing number of cases with deaths. Flattening the curve reduces the max number of cases, which reduces hospital overload, which in tun saves lives. Without any intervention we were/are looking at 1M+ deaths:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/opinion/coron...

That's a lot of people to condemn to death. Do you have statistics to cite for "Economic related deaths" that you quote?

1M+ deaths is impossible based on .gov's own numbers. Estmated 100-200k dead. The only way a hospital can help is with ventilators. Everyone else gets the exact same treatment at home or not. If we have a 90% death rate on ventilators than in an absolute worse case 'system overwhelmed' scenario there are 10% more deaths. The idea of millions is laughable, but to be expected from political opinion pieces.

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