That if you're under 54 corona virus isn't any more deadly than the flu?
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1473-3099%2820...
The long-term death rate of COVID-19 remains to be seen. The final verdict on how bad it was will depend on whether or not lengthy immunity is attained (including to mutations).
We do close schools here and there for a week or so when flu is getting large to get it under control. We do close hospitals for visits at this times.
Personally, I'm conservative on this, and have barely left my place in the last eight weeks. I can work from home and will suffer little even if the lockdown is quite lengthy. But not everyone is in such a fortunate position, and I think we need to consider what's happening very carefully.
Not even the most extreme estimates I've seen suggest that NY has anything approaching 50% immunity. Reopening NY and letting people catch CV19 would double, triple, ? the death rate.
There is no suggestion that NY is special as regards total numbers. (Velocity, due to population density, assume yes.) This is not the flu.
[0] A of 2020-04-17 880 deaths per 1M population. http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Aside from "old age", the leading causes of death (and certainly years lost) among people I knew are AIDS and traffic collisions. This virus is going to have to try a lot harder to get on that scoreboard.
It's also worth noting that "reopening" doesn't mean people will just revert to prior behavior. Most will be very careful, and some will never revert. Wuhan reopened, and their restaurants are not springing back (yet?).
I agree, reopening NYC would be a mistake, but large portions of the US (especially rural areas) remain largely unaffected by this.
The average age of death in my state (MN) is 88 with preexisting conditions. Our death rate is 0.0019% (!) with a flattened curve for some time now. Most of the US is not NYC.
Minnesota death rate is, as you say, currently at 19/million, but is growing at about 10%/day. The curve fits WA state's; continuing along that curve, WA currently has 79/million and is growing by 3%/day.
The question is "How much net difference will different reopening schedules make?". The answer to that is unclear, but remaining in lockdown for six months could easily kill more people (net).
I think we are considering things carefully. I can’t remember the last time you saw both dem and rep governors agree on anything, yet they are all agreeing on stay at home orders and testing.
Also, the thing to consider is that working class is whonis most at risk from this. Rich people have less comorbidities, can afford healthcare and are much more easily to work from home and buy via deliveries.
This is basically reason why African Americans die the most - working class can't isolate themselves so easily. They are the group to die more then same age non working class.
> The long-term death rate of COVID-19 remains to be seen.
At the moment we count flu deaths differently to covid-19 deaths.
Counting deaths due to flu is hard. We've only just started this work for Covid-19 by putting in standards for death certification. These stats lag the real time counts by some time, and they're always higher than the real time counts.
So, we're taking a method for counting flu than over-counts, and a method for covid-19 that undercounts, and then saying "covid-19 isn't that bad".
And that's just looking at deaths. We also need to look at hospitalisation (because we want to look at all the harm caused by different illness to assess whether our measures are reasonable or not; and because iatrogenic harm is a thing) and we see that covid-19 does put a lot more people in hospital than flu normally does. And this difference is only partly explained by rates of immunisation against flu.
Now there's some controversy that UK government have been reporting other deaths as flu, basically hiding Winter deaths due, eg to poor elderly care, in flu figures. So other sources suggest far far higher flu rates; but this is going off death registrations.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Covid19 death rates for under 50s are something of the order 1:1000, 30x the flu rate in data I've seen most recent (Worldometer) but reported rates vary considerably.
Happy for you to show it if this is wrong.
We're not going to, though, and it's becoming less clear why COVID-19 is an exception. It reminds me some of 9/11--it's flashy and freaking everyone out, which leads to irrationally conservative behavior.
That's with lock downs.
It's also hard to say what individual behavior would look like absent government orders to close businesses. Retail business could well be way down without any orders.
But, as we pass the initial peak and have better experience and surveillance, we should very carefully consider what to do next. Just locking down for a year or two is not the "safe" option.
What stats are you basing that on please? Because I can't find any stats that support this claim.
So best to err on the side of caution until this disease is more fully understood.
Smoking habits and seatbelt habits and just about everything else is in a steady state. Nothing we can do can change those situations dramatically, we can only nudge them to a small degree slowly because those situations and habits are entrenched.
The point isn't that N people die from this so we should be cool with it because N is in the same ballpark as stuff we've accepted. The point is that we have a short window to solve the new situation before acceptance sets in.