Serious question: do you have any family, friends, or even acquaintances that you would prefer not to have 3-6 weeks of terror and complete misery with a non-trivial chance of permanent disability or death?
This is a complex issue. Using hyperbolic emotional appeals to drown out discussion is not the right move.
Maybe not doing anything would've resulted in a few months of medical chaos and not much more, maybe it would've destroyed whole societies. But the polls I'm aware of show that the majority of people is supportive of measures nearly everywhere (I'm not aware of a poll that shows the opposite). In democracies, you'd expect politicians to act if the majority and experts support it.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1268263/sweden-coronavi...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8212365/Swedish-PM-...
The data both articles present for Sweden's death and infection rates also seem to suggest new measures might not be necessary (though admittedly the data seems pretty noisy; the recent drop in new deaths/infections could just be a fluke).
> But the polls I'm aware of show that the majority of people is supportive of measures nearly everywhere (I'm not aware of a poll that shows the opposite).
Now I don't want to speculate why people are in favor. Maybe because they believe experts but that usually doesn't work well.. I guess public opinion during the outbreak is also going to be a heavily researched area for years to come.
We'll likely get a good idea of what the "no or low response" route looks like.
With poorer countries (which applies to most of Africa), I guess it'll take several months or years until we know what the excess death rate was. Esp. in rural communities, that data probably often won't be reported as a Covid death. Even Northern Italy had an excess death rate 2x as high as the reported deaths and they had all the attention.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/13/833623311/in-sweden-a-differe...
Society isn’t a numbers game, it’s a shared set of values, and I find it appalling that we seem to be favoring the economy over human life. We have enough resources to take care of both, but chose to bail out corporations instead of people.
I really don't agree with this meme at all and the evidence doesn't support it whatsoever. The people that are hurt most by the shutdown are lower class service workers, not Wall Street stockbrokers. As I just mentioned, everyday people are hurting far more from the lockdown than from the virus. If you really cared about the average person, you'd want to get society running as soon as safely possible.
The idea that the government can support or pay for the salary of the entire/most of the population for a sustained period of time is also completely ludicrous and impossible.
The scientific consensus seems to be that if the disease had just been left to run it's course, even with people being moderately careful given how infectious it is, it would have caused huge death figures. Perhaps that might be proved wrong when we see some countries that simply socially distanced instead of locking down, but was it ever worth the risk?
All these "well, it's bad, but look at the economic damage" have to be weighed against what could have been, not what is. And we just can't imagine this, we can say it, but how many of us can imagine 10,000s dead per day?
Your Aunt dead, a colleague dead and your best-friend's Dad dead, your Butcher's Grandmother dead, your barista's sister dead, a teacher at your primary school dead, your football team's goalie dead. And more, and more. Of the few hundred people you know you would have known several people who would have died, or the thousand or so you are a 2nd connection to you would have heard of many deaths.
On top of that all, New York and the UK only really have Italy and Spain to look at as any sort of predictor. They now have to watch just two countries to see what happens when they start easing the restrictions, and due to the massive lag between infection and hospitalisation/death and insufficient testing capacity, it's all still guess work.
Lift it a week or two too early, and you might have to go into another lock down in a few months time.
Also, don't forget death rates would go up if a healthcare system collapses, which we haven't seen.
I think you're the delusional one, while your personal chance of dying is fairly low, you know hundreds of people, and those people know thousands more.
That is really the only question that matters.
"The Office for National Statistics said that in the week to 3 April, 16,387 people died in England and Wales, an increase of 5,246 deaths compared with the previous week and 6,082 more than the five-year average."
And that's WITH a lock down, way before the massive peak that could have happened.
It's like you're stuck in the wishful thinking stage the rest of us were in two months ago.
Also, you’ve responded several times without answering my question:
How many of your family, friends, and acquaintances are you willing to put up for the experiment?
> How many of your family, friends, and acquaintances are you willing to put up for the experiment?
This kind of snarky comment is precisely the problem. I'm not "willing to put up my friends" for experiment, because this isn't some zero sum game with simple answers. As I have said a dozen times now: it is a complicated situation and this "but people are dying, so we have to be as draconian as possible" take is extremely shortsighted.
There are millions of people that will now have serious problems because of the total shutdown. Here's a number for you:
> 45,000 – or one in five – suicides a year worldwide to unemployment, with a further 5,000 deaths caused by the economic crisis.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/the-link-between-unem...
45,000 people a year kill themselves because of unemployment. And that's just after 2008. We are apparently headed for a far worse crisis.
Have you considered the possibility that completely shutting down everything for months on end will result in more chaos and death than the virus itself? Even worse, this is entirely unpredictable?
As I said above: it's a complex issue. The consequences of shutting the world down just might be worse than the death toll of COVID. At the very least, it's a discussion worth having.
And "it's not a hyperbole" does not mean "it's not a complex issue" or "the alternative is better" or "it's not a discussion worth having". By all means, have your discussion. Point out that it's a complex issue like you already did. And if you dispute the claimed facts, dispute them and bring your own facts. If you don't, then just don't falsely accuse people of exaggerating them. Don't sling mud at factual arguments made in good faith; it's not difficult for others to reciprocate.
But isn't that what you just did here?
> Do you understand that millions of people are now out of work and won't be able to support their families, businesses are collapsing, calls to suicide lines are up massively, and society is general is not functioning?
So let's do some math instead.
The last stats I had were that 5% of people who catch it will die without a ventilator, 0.5% will die with it. So suppose we go "fast burn" to try to get "herd immunity" as quickly as possible, forget about overwhelming the health care system. 80% of your friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers will catch it, and 5% of those will die.
I reckon most people have about 500-1000 people they feel connected to. So think about your network: which 20-40 people do you want to die so that the rest can go back to work?
No, because I'm not drowning out the discussion, simply pushing back on the usage of hyperbole for pushing an opinion.
> The last stats I had were that 5% of people who catch it will die without a ventilator,
Your stats are way off and I suggest doing better research. They also don't factor in the idea that the virus is far more widespread than initially thought, and that these death rates only account for people that are sick enough to get tested in the first place.
I've been reading [1] daily more or less since early February, as well as lots of things posted here. I'm certainly no professional, but I think I'm reasonably well-informed for a layperson. If you think there's something I've missed, I think you'd do much better to actually point me to a resource you think is better.
I realize that "number reported" is an issue, and varies a lot from country to country. But consider Germany, who have [EDIT: ramped up to 400k+ tests per week] now. The most recent numbers from the situation report says that Germany has 125k reported cases, with 3k reported deaths -- a death rate of 2.3%. EDIT: Also consider Korea, which is alleged to have instituted a massive testing infrastructure as well. Their numbers are currently 10,564 cases, 222 deaths -- again, 2.1% death rate.
It's possible that both the German and Korean numbers of cases are massively underreported, but it can't be by much. That puts the death rate with non-overwhelmed hospitals at significantly higher than 0.5%.
If you want to convince me that the death rate for overwhelmed hospitals is less than 5%, you're going to have to do better than waving your your hands and saying "but what about people not sick enough get tested".
EDIT2: Been challenged on the "500k tests per day", acknowledging that while I look for support for that claim.
EDIT3: I slightly mangled my numbers from [2]. The numbers from that are that Germany has been doing 160K tests per week since 20 March; and that the government's goal is 200k per day. [2] According to [3], on the week ending April 5, Germany did 393k tests.
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
[2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-germany-has-managed-...
> And the total number of swab tests done by 4 April was well over 1.3 million.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52234061
The population of Germany is 83 million. I find it hard to believe that they've tested more than 5 million or so people in 10 days.
The only way to get the "die with the best medical care" number below 0.1% is if you have a million untested people who are sick.
If I was a proper statistician, with those numbers I could probably come up with models or estimates of how many possibly untested people there might be in Germany. My instinct is that number can't be millions, because at least some of those millions would be sick enough to go to the hospital, and then all of their connections would be tested and be found out.
But even then, what we really need is the "would have died without medical care" number, which is what the number would look like if we did a "fast burn" and let everyone get sick at once. For that number to be less than 1% (which would still be pretty dire), we need closer to 2 million unknown cases. I just don't see how 2 million positive cases can hide from the kind of testing Germany is doing. The same goes for Korea.
[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
Hospitals being overwhelmed is an exaggerated problem. It's not happening in many places. Most hospitals only need to provide a small amount of care and can actually scale this up rather quickly. You hear about people being triaged in Italy, but you need to remember that the people being triaged are likely to die regardless of whether or not they're admitted to the hospital. Averages are not your friend here. If 50% of ICU patients survive, that does not mean that everyone going into the ICU has a 50% chance of surviving. If we get to a point that triaging is needed (I think dubious in major US cities), that does not mean fatality rates will skyrocket.
Social distancing has been pretty darn effective, and it's probably a good idea to cautiously continue. But we also need to be pragmatic.
...because people are introducing restrictions to keep the number of cases down.
> Your mental model is mostly meaningless. ...Social distancing has been pretty darn effective, and it's probably a good idea to cautiously continue. But we also need to be pragmatic.
Ok, but at least mine I told you what the exact numbers are and where they came from. What are your numbers, and where did they come from?
You can't not have a model: you can either have an explicit one that you can reason about and question, or you'll have an implicit one you can't reason about or question.
You've waved your hand about why 5% death rate for a "fast burn" scenario is probably not exactly the precise number. I never said it was; but I think there's a pretty good chance it's in that ballpark.
You, on the other hand, haven't said what you think the death rate for a "fast burn" will be.
It is IRRESPONSIBLE to recommend a course of action without thinking through the consequences. Just wishing that 5% of people won't die isn't going to prevent those people from dying.
I'd like a 0.001% fatality rate in a "fast burn" scenario as much as anybody. If you can convince me that's a good number, I'll go around and try to convince others. Until that time, I'm going to continue going with the best guess I have, and a guess which lots of experts seem to be making as well.
I mean, yes, I do agree that social distancing is a good idea and that we should continue to do so. I acknowledged that much. But my real point here is that hospital capacity can scale up significantly higher than you might assume. Average level of care goes down for each person, but that's mostly fine. We can't treat people for this disease, so all the hospitals are doing is trying to keep people alive long enough to get over it themselves. A half hearted benefit of this is that since there isn't much you can do, you don't have to do much to help people as best as possible.
> Ok, but at least mine I told you what the exact numbers are and where they came from. What are your numbers, and where did they come from?
When I say your mental model is meaningless, I'm referring to "which 20-40 people do you want to die so that the rest can go back to work". You're thinking in averages, and that's not the case. The CFR of any population is going to be determined, foremost by the age distribution. I don't know if this is still true, but a while ago the CFR in italy was lower in every age group relative to China but worse overall due to age group differences and simpsons paradox. The concept of death rate is truly meaningless. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying its a pointless discussion. But sure, range of 0.5%-7% for a randomly chosen locale. Less than 1% average for those under 60 years old across the board.
For the record, I don't think rushing to herd immunity makes sense either, but there is a middleground.
> It is IRRESPONSIBLE to recommend a course of action without thinking through the consequences. Just wishing that 5% of people won't die isn't going to prevent those people from dying.
I think its pretty naive to say it's irresponsible to not have explicit threats on the disease but hand wave explicit threats on the economic consequences. I think it's better to let a 90 year old person die than to throw a 20 year old into poverty personally. Globalism is complicated. Depressions can cause famines, the rise of violent authoritarianism, and just general despair even if your particular society holds together. Poverty sucks, and it disproportionately hurts people who are already poor or in poor countries.
I presented you a model; yes it's oversimplified, but it results in at least some sort of concrete answer; and you can actually examine where it came from and reason about how valid it is. You can make arguments for some other death rate or herd immunity rate. (I took 80% from the most recent article I heard on the subject, but previously I heard 60%.)
You also actually have a model in your head for how many people are going to die (or not die). But I don't know where it came from. I can't examine it or reason about it. If you were an old-timer who'd seen hundreds of pandemics, or a historical epidemiologist who had studied hundreds of epidemics, maybe your "gut feel" would carry some weight.
But since (AFAICT) you're a layperson like me, I'm not inclined to think your implicit model is going to be very accurate.
You will have bodies abandoned in the streets, like in Ecuador.
Also it's only what is reported. There could've been a million people with it in the US but nobody knew...and still don't.
I really agree that we used a tsunami to put out a campfire. There was no reason to close everything basically. If this was like a 25% mortality rate of all those who got it, then yeah, the response would've been appropriate. This is like less than a percent for the majority of the population, a few percent for infants, and a few extra percent for old people. Which already have been at risk just for the sake of being old.
This whole event is just the media at large and social media blindly following as well overexaggerating this "crisis." 2008 was a crisis cause a bubble burst and banks defaulted. This was something made up that really did not need to be this drastic.