However, even if you think he's wrong, this is not an argument being made in bad faith. Censorship is a simply bad way to handle it.
Not sure if this is free to read, but it offers some of the reasoning behind the difficulty of shutting down the economy in poorer countries: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/03/26/the-coronavirus... Short quote: "The worry, as Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister says, is that “if we shut down the cities...we will save [people] from corona at one end, but they will die from hunger.“"
1: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560
Edit: I'm not advocating either. I believe that we can have our cake and eat it too: reopen the economy AND keep people from dying. It requires two things. Massive testing and tracing (https://medium.com/@sten.linnarsson/to-stop-covid-19-test-ev...), and allowing businesses to reopen when they have proper protection, isolation and cleaning protocols in place.
Of course both these things require large amounts of money so developing nations are screwed, as usual.
If you can convince the population to take your stance “for the good of the economy!” then have the decency to also inform them not to seek treatment and therefore not overload the health care system for those who wish to live.
So just keep an open mind.
There are more than two ways to address this problem. I am not an epidemiologist but I did watch a 3blue1brown video on YouTube last night. As I understand it, one of the most effective containment strategies is to test everyone, then take anyone who is infected as well as recent contacts of that person and ask them to self-isolate.
Imagine if we had rapid-result test kits that were deployed at all central choke point locations (say supermarkets, doctors offices, etc). If you needed food, you would have a test and the test would determine whether you contracted the disease. If the test was positive, you would have to submit your recent activities and contacts (perhaps aided by technology, such as tracking phone records or an app that tracks nearby bluetooth). The sick people would be placed into isolation and the contacts would be asked to quarantine.
What I see is a lack of foresight and innovative thinking from the very leaders we are seeking advice from. They're just giving us lazy answers that serve their own agenda. It's disgusting. We could have had effective testing in the US by now - we have made a conscious choice (probably out of inaction) not to develop them.
Face masks for everybody is best so far. In case you're infected and didn't notice that yet (or asymptomatic at all), you don't spread it.
Problem with "test everyone" is that by the time you test the last person, you can't be sure that the first person didn't caught it. And then you have a good chunk of false-negatives.
1. there are more than two options available to leaders (false dilemma)
2. there is a lack of true leadership and innovative thinking by our elected officials
3. you can't point to the side effect of the current strategy ("look at the economy!") and hand-wave away the side effect of another (lack of hospital resources to handle a peak infected load, causing even more suffering, loss of life, and public panic, most likely also affecting the economy)
The fact that I can't come up with a more effective solution as a layman in five minutes on an Internet comment board should not indicate that there are none.
That's not exactly a productive stance TBH.
You are strawmanning my argument. My argument is, yes, I believe that there are more than two possible solutions to this. I also argue that the "do nothing" solution has its own downsides. If, however, you force me to choose from the two solutions presented (social isolation, or do nothing)- I pick social isolation because I believe, at least in the US, a good balance between flattening the spread and economic impact.
Yes I'm pissed off, why aren't you? I don't accept mediocrity from my coworkers or direct reports; why would you accept it from your government?
I feel like we're all experiencing mass learned helplessness at this point! We need to demand more from our leaders, not less!
Personally I'm more pissed off at people who try to spin this situation to take a stab politicians they don't like for other reasons. Or just expect magic pill to appear out of nowhere.
The disinformation campaign "masks do no good!" brought more bad than good IMO. Sad to see lots of people believe that it's not worth to cover one's face out in public. Shitty propaganda in good faith is still shitty propaganda. Who could have thought people believe what they're told and don't change their mind on a whim when they're told opposite!
So lets consider some details:
1. Looking at past events, pandemics do kill (i.e. many tens of millions where killed by the Spanish Flu).
2. This Covid 19 also kills (i.e. high deaths tolls in Italy/Spain and rising etc).
3. Covid 19 also appears to be highly contagious (i.e. look at New York).
4. From what I have read the reason the virus kills is hospital get overrun so patients have zero treatment options (i.e. hospitals run out of ventilators, medical staff, space, drugs etc etc).
Now I suspect if Pakistan goes down the path of trying to save its economy before tying to control the virus, they are in for a world of hurt.
If you feel like the economy argument makes sense, fine, but let's not give this complete moron more credit than he's due.
Newspapers with emotive articles about not having space for the bodies: reliable & obviously true
European Union all-cause mortality monitoring data, used since 2009 and collected by ECDC/WHO/EUROSTAT/EISN: obviously incorrect
Got it.
On the other hand the numbers are too small so they currently don't make a dent in the overall statistics, however this is a problem of potential and every single prediction thus far came true, with the news being all bad.
The disease is scary not only due to mortality rate, but due to hospitalization rate too and in terms of hospitalization, there's not much difference between the young and healthy and the old or sick. When 10% of those infected require medical assistance, this will cripple your economy regardless of fatally. Plus if the medical system is collapsing, the median age will go down, since the young and healthy won't necessarily get the needed ICU beds.
There's also the small matter of the population not having any immunity to this virus (compared with Influenza) which guarantees that if unchecked it will spread to 70% of the population at least.
70% spread, with a 0.5% mortality rate (an optimistic estimate) means 1,560,422 dead just in the EU and this in the ideal case in which everybody gets treated, otherwise that rate can easily be double or triple. Or 27,000,000 worldwide. Such a number is comparable with the victims of World War I.
You're being down-voted because of downplaying the severity of this disease, when the writing is on the wall — the Italians downplayed this too and now their hospitals are overwhelmed.
Of course, a discussion of where this is headed and what can we do to avoid a severe economic depression is worth having, but let's not downplay how bad this is.
The baseline mortality rate in Italy is about 50,000 deaths per month, and that's averaged over the year -- it's considerably higher from November to April.
The concern should be about additional deaths, not the raw numbers of "how many people died after testing positive for Covid-19" -- which, it's worth noting, is the metric being measured here, not "deaths exclusively caused by Covid-19". We don't treat any other respiratory illness this way. If we applied the same logic to other respiratory illnesses (flu appears to be a trigger word these days, but it's the big one!) then a very large number of deaths we currently attribute to other things (cancer & heart disease to name two huge ones) would suddenly become "flu deaths".
(edited: I had an extra zero on the baseline mortality rate due to a calculation error)
If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1]
"But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections.
Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections."
[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19...
If you die because you have Covid-2019 and your lungs get filled with liquid, then it's definitely Covid-2019 that kills you, not the cancer. And how many people have terminal cancer right now?
I find this narrative particularly dangerous, because the chronic diseases that have been associated with Covid-2019 mortality, like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, are very much manageable with proper treatment. Yet the narrative is that these people are dying anyway, even if they might be having decades of productive life in them.
So the narrative is not only inhumane, it's also bullshit.
But the stats don't track if you died because "your lungs get filled with liquid". They only track if you die and the virus was present in a PCR test.
I find this narrative particularly dangerous
And yet you failed to understand it properly. It's faulty and facile reasoning like yours that is leading Twitter to delete tweets by elected national leaders; they think they're much smarter than they really are.
There's also another confounder, which is that the restrictions themselves are helping to keep other diseases in check. Air pollution in large cities for example has significantly gone down. Seasonal flu infections have gone down as well.
Any kind of comparison you're trying to make right now is apples versus oranges.
Also every prediction for Covid-2019 came true and 10,000 deaths in a single month may not seem high for Italy — even if the medics and nurses crying out of exhaustion should make you think that the shit has hit the fan — but that number could easily go to 50,000 or 100,000 per month, not to mention the young that may not die, but may suffer from respiratory illness for months or years afterwards.
And as I said, mortality rate isn't everything that counts, a 10% hospitalization rate cripples the medical system and is a clusterfuck for our economy anyway.
> Note concerning COVID-19 related mortality as part of the all-cause mortality figures reported by EuroMOMO
> Over the past few days, the EuroMOMO hub has received many questions about the weekly all-cause mortality data and the possible contribution of any COVID-19 related mortality. Some wonder why no increased mortality is observed in the reported mortality figures for the COVID-19 affected countries.
> The answer is that increased mortality that may occur primarily at subnational level or within smaller focal areas, and/or concentrated within smaller age groups, may not be detectable at the national level, even more so not in the pooled analysis at European level, given the large total population denominator. Furthermore, there is always a few weeks of delay in death registration and reporting. Hence, the EuroMOMO mortality figures for the most recent weeks must be interpreted with some caution.
> Therefore, although increased mortality may not be immediately observable in the EuroMOMO figures, this does not mean that increased mortality does not occur in some areas or in some age groups, including mortality related to COVID-19.
EDIT: you can even see COVID19 deaths btw - if you scroll down to Italy there is an uptick. If Lombardy was there separately the uptick would be even bigger - the disease kills almost 3 times the number of people who die on an average day
Yes people are dying and we should do everything possible to stop that. However I'm getting worried that there's no plan in place for how long this lasts or what happens afterwards.
A possibility is that it's not possible to control this virus, without continuous restrictions on movement, until a vaccine is ready. We're talking about a 12 - 18 months timeframe. If we keep the current restrictions for more than 2 months, we are already fucked, let alone for 12 months. Purposefully slowing down the economy for 12 months would be a disaster.
There's also a detail missed by the pro-economy camp of course: even if you relax restrictions, that doesn't mean we won't go through a severe economic recession, simply because people have already lost appetite for investing in useless shit they don't need, especially when other people are dying around them. This economic recession was inevitable, with or without restrictions.
But we also need to ensure that people don't end up dying of hunger and that's a conversation worth having. It seems to me that politicians don't have a clue about what to do and were this is going and that's freaking scary.
Maybe instead of a market economy that arbitrarily starves people we should democratically and rationally plan production and distribution for the benefit of all.
Beyond that, Cuba is the only environmentally sustainable country and exports medical care to the rest of the world.
Here's an explanation about Cuban democracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aMsi-A56ds
This idea that socialism is anything at all like fascism is disgustingly chauvinistic. It is based on the notion that only the West could possibly have freedom and anything different elsewhere must clearly be evil. Don’t fall for the propaganda.
I have talked to hundreds of people that lived in socialist countries. There are several surveys of Eastern Europeans on the subject. The vast majority of people (the workers) that experience socialism want it.
Yet when the USSR was overthrown, there were barely any political prisoners to be found.
Your claim has no proof to back it up, unless you mean "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn. That is widely known by historians to be unreliable fiction.
Do you think every country can just pull out trillions of dollars worth of support for their population when stuff like this happens?
best argument I have heard so far that counters this is from John Oliver last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElIf2DBrWzU