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Comment by elephantscan | Hacker News Reader

When are we just going to admit that our choices are:

1) indefinite lockdown 2) everyone gets the virus

Between a 0.5% chance of dying, and life imprisonment, I'd take my chances.

Here's the thing though, that binary choice is predicated on what we know right now, tomorrow we may know more, and we will definitely know more in a few weeks, in a month or two we may know enough that we have better choices to make. Our ability to treat this virus is very limited right now, but that may not be true in a month, so just throwing up your hands and saying let everyone die now when we don't have good treatment options is basically just signing peoples death warrant for no good reason.

This, precisely. Maybe we find better treatment (especially treatment that reduces the incidence of patients needing hospitalization or ventilators). Maybe we get testing technology widespread enough that we don't have to treat everyone like they're positive unless proven otherwise. Maybe we get antibody tests that allow us to figure out who isn't immunologically naive to the virus. Maybe we learn more about how it spreads. Maybe we learn more about why some people are asymptomatic.

Basically there are countless ways in which quality of life can be improved over time as we continue to maximize efforts to contain spread.

Yeah sure. a month, a year, a decade. How much of my life are you willing to steal?

The fatality rate for octogenarians is 15%. Octogenarians also have a 10% chance of dying every year anyway. At 18 months of lockdown 15% of them are dead anyway and you took a single digit percentage of my life away

Your chance of getting a severe case of you are infected is 5-10% or something similar. That’s a case that you want to have a hospital bed for, maybe an ICU bed.

If all beds are taken then many of those severe cases will kill people. Say mortality is 3% instead of 0.5% once hospital capacity runs out. Assume 60% need to get it before we have herd immunity. I don’t think 3% mortality without healthcare is pessimistic. Unfortunately we’ll soon find out if the disease hits Syria and similar places.

Not only that, thousands would also die from strokes and heart attacks and other things that they wouldn’t die from if hospitals weren’t full.

Hospital staff will simply quit when their job becomes a constant struggle to keep the hallways clear of corpses instead of saving people.

It’s not “0.5% dies why are we doing this?”, it’s “we do this so only 0.5% die”.

Between a 0.5% chance of dying and a 3% chance of dying I’d happily observe some measure of distancing for 12 months to get 0.5%.

This state of affairs is not life. I would kill myself if we have to do this for a year.

I’m sorry. You should try to talk to someone about that.

My restrictions at this point (Sweden) shows that with luck, perhaps restrictions don’t have to mean house arrest.

Complete lockdowns aren’t sustainable. I think countries will converge on a “new normal” which is far from lockdowns, while not “normal”.

The data on the Santa Clara (California) stats site shows that 10% of those tested are infected.

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/phd/DiseaseInformation/novel-co...

What your comment is missing is that the mortality of ventilators is 66% - 90%. So they're not a good solution for most patients. ICU doctors have been recommending using non-intrusive methods like cannulas as long as possible before intubating. However, that causes aerosolization of corona, so quarantine buildings are needed.

Please see my links for more detailed info.

It doesn’t really matter if mortality in ICU’s is high so long as it’s much higher without ICU treatment. For young patients the mortality is very low exactly because they are likely to survive ICU care, while a 70 year old is unlikely to survive and an 80 year old is unlikely to be given ICU care to begin with.

If ICU mortality is extremely high (e.g over 2/3) then doctors probably need to be more selective. The judgement should be not only that patients should walk out, but also survive for a period after treatment, say a year. It’s also not only about ICU treatment, regular hospital beds and doctors are also not unlimited.

I think in many places doctors are feeling pressured to use invasive ventilation for patients that have a low chance of surviving a year after care. Patients who get invasive ventilation should be carefully selected even if there is no shortage. If mortality is very high, this is a signal that doctors are giving ICU care to too many patients that aren’t helped by it.

Early numbers from Sweden report 80% survival from ICU. Not all of those were on invasive ventilation, and there may be a bias where survivors are discharged sooner while those who eventually die are still there. But numbers are definitely encouraging says doctors.

Because you're leaving out the third choice: control the rate of infection so that the chance of dying is lowered.

In practice this seems to be a subset of the first choice. Everyone who has a proposal to control the rate of infection also says we need to lockdown indefinitely until their proposal is fully implemented.

The whole plan is number 2. We are waiting until this burns out through the population, most people get better, and move on with their lives.

The purpose of social distancing is to slow the burn so our hospitals aren't overwhelmed, and won't have to triage coronavirus patients vs. people with any other sort of emergency coming to the hospital.

This practice will save thousands of lives of people with a bad case of coronavirus, but also the people who get into car crashes, or have problems with giving birth, or heart attacks, or any other reason that requires immediate emergency care.

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