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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

or .. the numbers were wrong and we never needed half these facilities, or to bring the world economy to a grinding halt. Our European counterparts are probably fine, but low-income Americans have lost a lot.. more than we can repay.

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Which numbers were wrong, and when? You can actually see a leveling off of the deaths and hospitalizations in CO within the 2 weeks following the initial stay-at-home order. I would take any numbers regarding "infections" with a grain of salt because those are so susceptible to the number of people able and willing to get tested, and how those test results are reported back up to the state. Every state seems to have differences in that approach.

No, that's not what the article says. It says there was no planning or coordination between the hospitals and the field hospitals to get patients in.

exactly. they panic hired a bunch of contractors with no real operating plan on how to utilize them, and now taxpayers are footing the bill for the contracting company CEO's third mansion.

The lockdown isn't causing the economic crisis, the pandemic is. The economy would grind to a halt anyway without lockdown measures if the pandemic were spreading unchecked and a million [1] people were dying in the space of a few months. Everyone would be barricading themselves in their homes and not going out to restaurants and movie theaters.

[1] (70% infected to get herd immunity * 0.5% fatality rate * 330 million people = >1 million people).

I think that until we get everyone tested we aren't going to know the real fatality rate. Some portion of people, perhaps larger than we expect, experience this virus as a cold that passes normally. Some people never even realize they have it. Until we have tested everyone and know for sure how many people have it asymptomatically that fatality rate is likely an overestimate and we can't really know by how much.

The 0.5% estimate is based on seroprevalence studies (which take into account the asymptomatic infected). The crude case fatality rate is more like 5%, which is definitely an overestimate.

Also >0.2% of NYC has already died, so it's not possible for the fatality rate to be substantially below 0.5%.

Not sure why you're so heavily downvoted but if you took the total deaths across NYC and divided by the entire population of NYC, you get a strict lower bound IFR of 0.14% which makes this at least 3x deadlier than the flu. If you figure more like 1/5 of NYC has been infected, your IFR is more like 18x as deadly as the flu.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.22.20076026v...

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