Lives will be disrupted either way, lifting restrictions too early will result in more deaths, which is the ultimate disruption of life.
Not to mention 1/100 is enough for a lot of people to result in at least one person they know dying.
It's really not. People just don't seem to grasp that the rates for positive cases are drastically different than the rates for people infected. We aren't doing nearly enough testing to catch even all the symptomatic cases let alone the asymptomatic and mild ones.
The infection fatality rate is almost certainly under 1% and not everyone will get infected even in the worst case.
>Not to mention 1/100 is enough for a lot of people to result in at least one person they know dying.
Only if we use a very broad definition of what "know" means.
Which parts are that?
It's also probably just a statistical outlier. Even if the overall IFR is 0.5% you will see some areas with rates higher or lower than that from chance or their demographics.
And most people have family members that are in the high risk group.
It's amazing how many people are willing to sacrifice millions of people on the altar of the economy--when it wouldn't even work very well because people are going to be minimizing risk anyway.
I hate this framing that makes it seem like it’s a choice between caring about people and caring about money. When the economy crashes it causes real misery for real people.
What do you think is the overall right length of time for the lockdown? Do you think we should already be getting back to work now?
Please read up on the Great Depression. Economic downturns can be pretty bad. If they could have solved it by just giving everyone unemployment, they would have.
Edit:
> What do you think is the overall right length of time for the lockdown?
I don’t know dude, I’m not an economist. I just think the economic effects should be properly taken into account and weighed against the health effects. Yes, there is some amount of economic damage that it’s worth some number of people dying to avoid. That seems obvious to me, but people act like you’re a Nazi if you point it out.
It's already happened in a few places.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-funeral-al...
> "We're all going to die one day"[0]
> “I’m sorry, some people will die, they will die, that’s life,” Bolsonaro said in a television interview on Friday night. “You can’t stop a car factory because of traffic deaths.”[1]
> Bolsonaro has compared the new coronavirus to a "little flu," condemned the reaction to it as "hysteria," and said Brazilians' immune systems are so strong they can swim in raw sewage and "don't catch a thing."[2]
> He has called the virus a “measly cold.” “Some will die” from it, he said, because “such is life.” [3]
> ..more than 20 members of Bolsonaro’s U.S. delegation have tested positive for the coronavirus. Bolsonaro ignored his own health ministry’s advice to self-isolate for a couple of weeks and to discourage large gatherings. He made a defiant show of shaking hands and taking selfies at a rally that attracted hundreds of his supporters. [4]
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/brazils-bolsonaro-downplay...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/27/world/americas/27...
[2] https://www.afp.com/en/news/15/bolsonaro-takes-down-virus-sh...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/world/americas/brazil-bol...
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/bolsona...
The US sure has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean everything we do is the worst.
By comparison, outside of cities, the spread will be far, far slower than within. Yes, healthcare is worse, but there's an order of magnitude fewer cases. People travel less. They go to the store once every two weeks, not every 4 days, even when there isn't a quarantine. They don't visit the new hipster restaurant down the street. They don't live twenty feet away from their neighbors.
NYC has 25% of all of the United State's cases, despite having ~2% of the US's population. This is the same story that is playing out in every state. Let's take Indiana as an example, being that they're having a relatively moderate outbreak with mostly rural areas surrounding a top 15 US city by population: Indianapolis has 41% of the state's cases, despite representing ~12% of the state's population.
This shouldn't be a surprise; diseases spread faster in cities. But, what you're asserting is that, eventually, rural areas will see the same spread that cities are. This feels misguided. That isn't to say that some, or even most, rural hospitals wont be "running hot" for a really long time, and that the virus wont spread and these areas, but its simply unlikely that the situation will ever be as bad as in major cities.
There’s also a time lag. I think it hit New York first because of all the travel connections.
But why would rural areas be immune? People do still meet each other. They do go to church.
Tellingly, flu death rates tend to be higher in rural areas:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/19/rural-areas...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/louisiana-pastor-who-defied-coron...
I and all the people I know are taking all the precautions, but density has to play into how fast something can spread.
Logically it make sense to want more rural. If you test positive go to the nearest big city for treatment.
My roommate works in a random thrift shop, they're classified as "essential business" so he still shows up to work every day to read book.
Credit card companies are slashing credit lines. Postal service is failing to deliver mail in some locations. Unemployment numbers/systems work as well as Healthcare.gov did upon launch.
We are one to two weeks away from massive civil unrest when thousands of people have no money to pay for food.
If that system gets rolled out, the US as the country is over because it is an admission that the US is not capable of maintaining it's existing economic system.
The only part of the distribution system that isn't working very well because of the shutdown is the part that distributes dollars.
Any service disruptions right now are not due to the shutdown - they are due to the actual effects of the virus. Look at the MTA. Half of its employees are sick, and the other half have called in sick. Train service has been reduced, and passengers are now packed like sardines in a can on the trains that are still running. Look at the supply chain disruptions - they aren't caused by people being stopped from coming in to work - they are because people can't, or are afraid to come into work.
As well they should be, given the state of healthcare in this country. Who is going to pay for their care if they are one of the 20% that need hospitalization after catching it?
That's a talking point.
Chinatown grocery stores are mostly closed in both Manhattan and Queens. Patels is closed everywhere.
Edit: Downvotes don't protect from reality
Effective grocery store prices are 2x - all of the sales have been removed. Eggs in Queens went from $1.69/dozen to $7.99 a dozen.
$1200 tax credit for 2020 ( this is what it actually is ) is nothing for people who live and support high cost areas which are the people who allow for the white collar jobs to exist.
Every state with shutdown orders considers logistics essential services. Nobody but the virus is preventing the people working in them from going to work.
I'll repeat it: Nobody working in food production and distribution is forbidden from going to work.
If prices are rising, it has nothing to do with the shutdown, and everything to do with the fact that there's a global pandemic... Which will be made worse if lift the shutdown orders.
Are you planning on ordering these people back to work at gunpoint, to lower the price of eggs? Or are you going to instead, consider extending a short-term loan, so that the grocer can absorb the price hike? The number of hens laying eggs hasn't changed over the past four weeks.
> I'll repeat it: Nobody working in food production and distribution is forbidden from going to work.
That is not the message that is being repeated on TV and on the news. The message is "stay home. if you are close to people you are going to be infected and die. stay home". The message is not "Stay home unless you work in list in blah blah blah. Also, unless you have comorbidity such as diabetes, heart disease, compromised lunges you are going to be fine". If you keep repeating that people are going to die, people are going to believe you even though the number of people who are going to die that do not have comorbidity factors have a very low risk. That's how you destroy logistic.
Right now Amazon, objectively a logistics company, has an equivalent of the ground hold on all non-essentials. I cannot get a frying pan delivered until April 24th.
> I'll repeat it: Nobody working in food production and distribution is forbidden from going to work.
We are at 10% of seasonal flu death numbers heading head first into a wall.
Amazon is having a hold because demand for everything is up, because people are trying to avoid going outside to shop... And because their employees are concerned about their personal safety. No government agency has stepped in to shut down an Amazon warehouse. If you lift the shutdowns, you will actually increase their concerns about personal safety.
> If you keep repeating that people are going to die, people are going to believe you even though the number of people who are going to die that do not have comorbidity factors have a very low risk.
Those people have relatives who are at risk, or may not be interested in rolling the dice on ending up in the hospital. This virus has a much higher hospitalization rate than the flu. Are you ready to pay for all their medical bills? Has socialized medicine finally found its moment to arrive on the shores of the United States? Or, alternatively, are you personally ready to take a job lifting boxes in a warehouse for $15/hour with no medical benefits? One that you commute to in a subway car that's packed shoulder-to-shoulder with sick people?
The MTA is unable to operate the NYC subway, because they have so many sick employees. Do you think a Krelminesque order to stop broadcasting bad news on the telly is going to defy reality, and get the subway running at full capacity, again?
> We are at 10% of seasonal flu death numbers heading head first into a wall.
Italy has, over the span of 4 weeks, hit 300% of their regular seasonal flu deaths, and 50% of the hospitalizations, despite a lockdown but this apparently does not stop people on the internet from drawing false equivalences to the flu.
Do you have a better plan for dealing with a virus that sends more people to the hospital in 4 weeks, than the flu does in half a year? How many hospitalizations and deaths do you think they would have hit if cases continued to double every three days?
You cannot have it both ways - either employees are concerned for their safety and logistics therefore is affected or they are not and logistics is not affected.
> The MTA is unable to operate the NYC subway, because they have so many sick employees. Do you think a Krelminesque order to stop broadcasting bad news on the telly is going to defy reality, and get the subway running at full capacity, again?
MTA decided to cut the service on NYC subway because it projected a drop of demand. It is an organization has been been mismanaged for decades. I find it very difficult to believe that it would suddenly be making marginally optimal decisions in "the stay at home" environment.
> Italy has, over the span of 4 weeks, hit 300% of their regular seasonal flu deaths, and 50% of the hospitalizations, despite a lockdown but this apparently does not stop people on the internet from drawing false equivalences to the flu.
The vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths come from comorbidity.
> Do you have a better plan for dealing with a virus that sends more people to the hospital in 4 weeks, than the flu does in half a year? How many hospitalizations and deaths do you think they would have hit if cases continued to double every three days?
Order a stay at home for at risk population and population with comorbidity. Lift it from anyone else. Eat 10-15% hit to the economy rather than a total devastation. The mass poverty creating economic hit is going to destroy the medical system much faster than COVID-19.
This is a very weird line of argumentation. Do you think there is some media-wide conspiracy in favor of containment? To what end?
These "talking points" are also what the epidemiologists and politicians are saying. Just because you are in the minority that doesn't agree with it doesn't make you right and everyone else wrong.
But due to years of people handwringing over abuse, and "economists" encouraging thrift, the process to get food stamps isn't speedy, it's state-by-state, and now it's overwhelmed.
Due to the general anthemia among the GOP for welfare type programs, different states are going to see different levels of urgency with boosting the food stamp programs. It's much the same as how some GOP led states refused the medicaid expansion that was part of the ACA.
Hopefully this will reveal new information to voters of those states as they slowly starve and as they realize that certain other states are doing better - what's the difference? Competent governance. You can't buy it, but you can vote for it.
Perhaps I'm simply misreading the situation and am in a bad mood, but it seems that whenever we see a government program rolled out, politicians seem more interested in preventing fraud, misuse, and politically sensitive spending than they are in seeing the program actually succeed / solve it's stated problem. This results in layers of complexity, regulations, and bullshit that impede the program from functioning efficiently. I would rather a cash transfer program have a 25% fraudulent claim rate and a 90% legitimate claim success rate than a 2% fraudulent claim rate and a 50% legitimate claim success rate. Politicians seem to want the latter. Further, there were arguments during the negotiations about the 2 trillion dollar bail out about abortions and oil subsidies ffs. These guys need to get their heads out of their asses and join us in the real world.
It's the "do it yesterday" part that they're having trouble with. Major banks are saying that the government isn't forthcoming with the details they need to actually implement the lending program, so they've had to delay its launch.
[1] https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relie...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianthompson1/2020/04/03/no-sm...
There are two possibilities:
1. This program is going to continue the great tradition of government epic failures of providing help to small businesses
2. This time around it works and small businesses get an immediate ( in a commercial sense of the word ) help in record time.
One won't need to be a genius to figure out the implication of 2. Personally, I think it would be 1.
The CARES act did do this, and it did it yesterday.
Since we are now awaiting implementation, politicians are no longer in the picture. They understood what needed to be done, and did their jobs. It is now up to the bureaucrats.
Now that congress has passed the law, it's up to the EXECUTIVE BRANCH of the government to make it happen. There's a politician at the head of that - POTUS.
People wanted an outsider in the White House, someone who would "shake things up", and this is the consequence. This is what it means.
The POTUS can and should be making this implement faster.
This is implemented through the agencies of the Executive branch, the operations for which are almost entirely run by bureaucrats. When Trump entered office, he didn't just fire all of the bureaucrats at the Department of Labor, he just replaced its head.
The folks that work on the day-to-day operations of processing unemployment insurance claims, or maintaining/improving the systems remain largely unchanged. Their employment is a function of the budget and funding, which is determined by Congress, and then assented by the POTUS.
In the case of CARES, the Senate unanimously passed it, and POTUS quickly signed it into law. He is not going to micro-manage its implementation. It's now up to the bureaucrats.
I see most of the advocates for "shelter in place until we're safe!" are white collar people with space at home and direct deposit.. not hourly workers who just lost their livelihoods with kids at home and the only internet is on their phone.
Edit: Listen to the person replying to me. It is not 20%, but 3.3%. I am off by an order of magnitude.
.66% CFR, with 3.3% hospitalized (and fewer ICU) under age of 40. Even in the >80 age range, hospitalization is < 20%.
If you're going to make a point, make the point with accurate numbers -- those are off by an order of magnitude.
This changes nothing.
It literally changes everything, as you're spreading false information. Instead of 20%, it's 3.3% - that doesn't change anything? It's the difference of tens of millions of lives just in the United States!
Yes, 3.3% is still high, but it's not even in the same ballpark as 20%. And not everyone will be hospitalized at once, which is the entire point of flattening the curve.
I’ve already edited my comment to concede on 20%. Why get so combative in responding? I’m not trying to spread false information and willing to concede when new factual information is reported. Jeez.
Because you were arguing tens of millions of deaths "changes nothing."
That's not to say that a few young people with no health issues might be harmed. There will be some, but from what I've see thus far, all other potential causes of death in the next year from things like cars accidents are more likely than dying of COVID19 in the next year for those young people with no co-morbidities.
Just saying young people in general have a CFR of 3% isn't helpful.
Give it another two weeks. Thank god people with foresight and basic math skills are the ones planning for increased hospital capacity.
BTW God should be capitalized it's a proper noun.
> Across the city, hospitals are overrun. Patients have died in hallways before they could even be hooked up to one of the few available ventilators in New York. Doctors and nurses, who have had to use the same protective gear again and again, are getting sick. So many people are dying that the city is running low on body bags.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-u...
I'm not sure what you mean by "over capacity", either. If you're talking beds, ICU slots, and ventilators, maybe not yet. If you're talking lack of staffing, lack of PPE availability, general workload, then I think many are straining or over capacity now.
It's also impossible to know if we if we have peaked or not. It's just like trying to time the stock market. The only thing that really matters is the death rate. The rate of cases doesn't matter and is likely under counted. We are testing more and more people which increases the case rate. If we tested everyone including those with no cases and found a lot more people than expected have the virus the death percentage would go down.
I am also skeptical of how the start of the spread in the US was determined. It's possible it was much earlier and early cases were confused with Flu and we are in fact near the peak of the death rate.
It seems old ones are also the people who have most real estate in America?!
So if virus is passed on to old people and they die. Then natural consequence will be that, their property will be passed onto their kids who will most likely sell it immediately and cash out why? Because kids of most wealthy suburban families usually live in huge Metropolitan cities so they are unlikely to hold onto property in suburb.
And does it mean soon lots of cheap properties will be available for sale in suburb?
Once isolation ends then the bill collectors will start coming and the free meals will be come rare but people will remain severally unemployeed.
The people with no savings are the ones that are going to most want this to last since there's no going back to the way things were right now. Many of the jobs lost will not be immediately replaced when the isolation stops.
I will probably go to prison, child support is still enforced. There is ZERO sympathy.
Do you expect more properties to come on market for younger folks? Will it become cheaper to buy new property?
A few more months like this and people will start dying from other causes (crime, hunger...).
A 20 years old is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed by COVID.
The life expectancy saved by the lockdown is just so small. I find it extremely hard to believe that the lockdown will cause less loss of life than the new virus would have.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1473-3099%2820...
Still "Flattening the curve" seems to be the only thing epidemiologists are focusing on, but ignoring the death toll from unemployment, domestic abuse, depression/suicide, and others. Not to mention how many people will die from exposure to being evicted due to being unable to pay rent or hunger from buying groceries. Or the long term effects of depressions or social anxiety from being locked down, etc. These are real factors.
The CDC's lack of modeling of these factors is disconcerting, if not bordering on _incompetence_. I've been searching for models (preferably using STAN or similar to calculate adjusted statistical likelihoods) to estimate holistic effect of lockdowns on overall death rates adjusted for those factors. So far I haven't found anything, or very limited research.
It sucks, but as a society, we have to be able to critically analyze the situation, including the tough factors of triage at a societal level.
Are you going to be willing to postpone all medical interventions for the next three months because there's just not going to be available hospital capacity for your broken tooth?
Why are we building emergency mortuaries?