And all this for a virus that kills around 1% of the people who get it, and the majority of them are retired.
Future generations will look at us and wonder how we were this stupid.
Future generations will look at us and wonder how we were this stupid.
The number of people that have it is under reported, so the death rate and hospitalization rates are exaggerated.
Just based on the experience in other countries, GP seems quite spot on in terms of who is impacted, who dies, and the percentage of the population. Your comment seems speculative and substantial number of non-70+ year olds dying has not been borne out by the data at all.
> On Tuesday night, the health authority in the Grand Est region said two-thirds of its 620 old people’s homes had been affected by the coronavirus pandemic and 570 residents had died.
> Those 570 people are not recorded in France’s official coronavirus death toll, which reached 4,032 on April 1, but so far counts only those who have died in hospital.
> In an Italian retirement home in Mediglia, outside Milan, 52 of the 152 elderly staying there had died from Covid-19 infection by last week.
> In the province of Bergamo, 2,060 deaths were attributed to the virus in March. However L’Eco di Bergamo, a local newspaper, found that a total of 5,400 deaths occurred in the province in March, up from just 900 in the same month in 2019.
https://www.ft.com/content/58ece0fb-d297-495e-8889-da216410f...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france...
In London someone died of malaria last week because it took 9 hours for an ambulance to show up.
Letting it run its course it needs to infect 60-70% of the population before herd immunity kicks in. 1% of 60% of the population of the US is 2 million people. World-wide you're looking at 45 million people for a very optimistic scenario. The numbers could easily be 5 or 10 times larger. If we're lucky and the number of asymptomatic cases is very high, the numbers could also be lower. At this stage we really don't know, but I don't think it's ethical to take that risk.
This is obvious if you compare the numbers between different countries versus their relative level of hospital capacity.
The trade-off is between loss of lives one way versus loss of lives another way.
I don't see much mention of this among the "back to work at any cost" crowd, and I wonder why. It seems like a pretty obvious consideration.
Yes, bad economies harm people. But they also reduce harm. Pointing simply at directionality due to a bad economy is disingenuous.
[0] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1 [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200326-covid-19-the-imp...
Unfortunately it's live without the per-day history, but you should consider that we're at the peak right now.
Considering the many people downvoting I feel like US news suggest otherwise. Weird!
Italy is treating every single patient with high standard healthcare. They did not reach the "0 free ICUs" moment yet.
What we can say as of today is that the high number of deaths do not depend on overwhelmed hospitals, but likely just because there are A LOT of covid patients. Also a greater average age and the fact that older people are much more integrated in the society played a role affecting mortality, but still those are only theories and we can't say how much they affected the total.
I don't see where people are getting 5% from. 1% is already 10x worse or so than the flu, I don't see the need to exaggerate the facts.
Regardless, I'll admit that I was wrong - there are still people dying. Regardless, we'd have to get about 3-4x the number of deaths we've had so far to reach 5% - and from the sources I can find most of those remaining cases are non-critical (though there could be even a doubling).
In that case we are doubling our deaths for a year. Very significant, but in the grand scheme of things it poses no real danger to the species. I haven't decided if I agree with the position that collapsing the economy is worse than letting those deaths happen, but I understand how someone could feel that way. Ask me again after I lose my cushy software job because it's a luxury companies can no longer afford with nobody buying anything.
Everyone seems to get tied up in the % of fatalities. Debating those numbers are a waste of energy, everyone is just cherry-picking numbers that support their own arguments. But we know for a fact that without containment measures (and even with them), this virus can result in the health care system getting overwhelmed and possibly collapsing.
This has a number of impacts, 1) Health care workers will die at a much higher rate than normal. This will have lasting impacts. 2) Anyone who needs health care for any reason will be in trouble (cancer patients, diabetes patients, pregnant women, accidents, etc...). I read somewhere that ~30% of home births require emergency hospitalization. How would our economy do if ~30% of pregnant mothers died during child birth? 3). Even without government mandated shut-downs, people will reduce economic activity to avoid the risk of getting COVID or getting into an accident that would require a hospital visit. Many companies were cancelling events and implementing WFH policies before local governments required it.
This isn't really an either/or option. The economy is going to take a massive hit regardless of the actions we take. But by implementing shut-downs we can save lives and also potentially get back to normal business faster than we would otherwise.
I'd definitely rather risk that than risk a couple million people dying over the course of a few months - 1% of 70% of 320M, and that's just in the US. What effect on the economy do you expect would come of that?
On the economy? Very little. Most of the people dying are not in the job market any more nor are they big consumers. It might even reduce the load slightly on Social Security and Medicare.
No, the risk of letting a couple million extra people die this year is a social/moral one, not an economic one IMO.
If I remember correctly, they had between 10-20% of the usual activity.
Even if it's not mandated, people don't want to take the risk, either for others or for themselves.
All of this to say: I don't think the options are between close the economy to save people (at least short term), and don't close the economy and bear the hit. The latest one is not an option, the economy will mostly shut down by itself
A hugely positive one because the deaths are for people who no longer work and generally are net drains on the economy, with either multiple diseases, old age or some other disability.
The effect of wealth transfer between generations alone would be amazing, with 20-40 year olds inheriting housing for the first time since the 90s in large numbers.
Have you considered the position that a collapsed economy is inevitable due to deaths? Or that it would lead to less pollution, saving lives (although who knows what the net-net would be)?
7M people die annually from air pollution, according to the WHO. Early estimates of pollution reduction are in the 20-50% range; even a sustained 5% reduction is 350k lives saved/year.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/clinica...
1. We have no idea how many people were infected
2. We have no idea how many people who have died died from Covid 19
3. The population pyramid in Italy is extremely disparate from the rest of the world.
Treating any modeling we have of the impact of Covid 19 as reliable is an exercise in insanity.
EDIT: To be clear this isn't to say that the responses are unwarranted. It's just to say that they are conservative and acting on knowingly incorrect information. If they were the right decisions remains to be seen. The impact of global financial collapse isn't just 'stocks down', but has tangible impacts on life expectancy, healthcare quality, and quality of life globally. Time will tell.
In detail, yes. In general, you can still make some good back-of-an-envelope calculations.
Conservative estimates are that the coronavirus has a CFR of about 1% given adequate medical care (South Korea's statistics, where testing has been comprehensive enough that we should have identified any wide pool of asymptomatic cases), and another low estimate of its R0 factor is 2. Left unsuppressed, this implies that the disease would spread to infect about half of the population, and it would kill 1% of those infected.
For the United States, that implies that a "flattened curve" -- where mitigation prevents medical resources from being overwhelmed but does not fully suppress the disease's spread -- will kill about 1.6 million people.
Beyond that, we know that the disease requires intensive care at some multiple of the death rate (say 2x) and hospitalization at another multiple (say a further 3x). These estimates are reasonably consistent with New York's numbers (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/new-york-coronavirus...). Testing shortfalls could make these multiples worse, if there are hospitalized or ICU patients positive for the virus but not included in these totals.
Given overwhelmed medical services, we can presume that a large fraction (say half?) of ICU patients would die for want of care, and a smaller but still significant fraction of hospitalized patients would do the same (1/8?).
This implies that an un-flattened curve would have roughly triple the death rate, with the excess caused by inadequate care. With a 3% inadequate-care CFR, if left to run its course the disease would then kill about 4.8 million Americans.
> It's just to say that they are conservative and acting on knowingly incorrect information.
If policymakers are acting on "knowingly incorrect information," it's because their assumptions are too benign rather than too severe. I believe that my estimates above should be uncontroversial, and to the extent they err I've tried to err on the less-deadly, less-contagious side.
Various models and data sets put asymptomatic cases at between 20% and 50%. Those are fully asymptomatic - i.e. total end-to-end progression with either very mild symptoms indistinguishable from a minor cold, or no symptoms at all.
It's almost impossible to estimate expected population mortality with limited and noisy data, but I've seen estimates from 1.5% to 0.05%.
The only thing that can be said with certainty is that social distancing, testing, and tracking all do a lot to prevent initial infection, and good access to ICU hugely improves chances of survival after infection.
The rest is guesswork at this point. Having said that - my current hand-wavy estimate of deaths in the UK is high five, low six figures. Multiply by five or so for the US.
That's why I use South Korea as a model. They've tested enough that they should have found the majority of asymptomatic cases, and they still have CFR above 1% (1.7% as of this writing).
That also puts a bound on reasonable levels of occult spread. We can support maybe 50% of cases being totally asymptomatic and undetected, but if that is significantly greater then we'd see contact-tracing (again, SK-style) entirely fail as a control measure.
So it seems like an absolute best-case CFR is 0.5%, if it would be 1% among symptomatic cases and there again that many that never notice / are diagnosed with the disease. For the UK, that would give an optimistic projection of (66e6 * 50% * 0.5% =) 165k deaths in a "herd immunity" outcome with a "flat curve", so this is consistent with the range of your "hand-wavy estimate."
Barring the development of a vaccine (which is far from guaranteed, and a year or more away, in the best case), letting the virus sweep through the population is pretty much the only thing that would bring this to an end quickly. We could achieve herd immunity in a few months and have it behind us.
This situation is a direct tradeoff of time (and money) for lives.
Our current actions are focused on the goal of leveling the curve, not putting up a wall. There aren't armed guards outside our homes preventing us from leaving. The grocery stores are open. We can come into contact with others to order just about all goods we've always been able to order. We can go to parks and trails and beaches. This will cause more infections, and we all know it; but thanks to these measures, ER visits in our city are down over 20%, allowing healthcare some capacity to deal with the influx infected people, and our daily growth of infections doesn't look exponential anymore.
This thing hospitalizes many young (under 40 years of age) people as well, and in our state that has been on lockdown for longer than many others, medical fellows and residents from unrelated specialties are being asked to help with COVID-19 cases. In a week or two at most it's expected they'll be required to help. If our government wasn't taking these defensive measures, we'd already need more space to store the bodies.
Literally the fastest way to get this over with is to let it sweep through the population. More people might die if we did that, but it would get it over with quickly.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/italys-coronavirus-deat...
There’s error in the numerator of the equation, but it’s swamped by the error in the denominator.
If Italy has missed half of its deaths but also half of its total cases, the fatality ratio would remain the same. To bring its CFR down to the level of South Korea, you'd have to make the implausible assumption that Italy has caught nearly all of its deaths but missed more than 85% of its total cases.
It’s not at all implausible that Italy has missed the vast majority of it’s cases, because they’re barely testing, and they’re not testing minor cases. It’s essentially guaranteed that they’re missing a huge number of cases.
A reasonable estimate is that they’re missing 10 cases for every one they actually detect. The error in the denominator is much larger than the error in the numerator.
Crass, no? So what if it's 1%. It's life. Nothing else matters.
That does make some sense. None of us picked the circumstances of our birth, but we have billions of people because of the economy, because we don't all grow our own food, because some people specialize in scientific research, etc. Now, we have billions of people that depend on a functioning economy, and if it doesn't function, people will die that way as well.
Should we shut down the country and quarantine ourselves during every flu season? In an average year the flu kills about 0.01% of the population, and nothing else matters but trying to save those tens of thousands of people, right?