Considering that the virus is here to stay for a few years at least, how can we blame them for thinking this way? Lifting the lockdown is not gonna make the virus disappear.
I returned a bike yesterday in North Beach (SF) and people were crowded together. Maybe half of the people were wearing masks. There was a 4 piece street band walking around playing brass instruments like it was a carnival.
That's an aspect of the universal 6-foot rule that everyone seems to forget. It originally appeared as advice for business (restaurants). You don't want to sit too close to someone else in still air. But if we are spitting, singing, shouting, coughing, panting, playing in a Jazz band, or are simply downwind of someone, that 6-foot distance is probably not enough. Airlines have basically said as much about their cabins. If the air is being circulated artificially in a closed environment, specific measured distances are probably irrelevant.
I do appreciate that public health authorities have to make clear and simple recommendations to avoid confusing people. But let's not pretend there is anything scientific about it.
Such data is much harder to collect after an infection has become endemic, but early contact tracing can provide great data.
I take your point that there will be economic paint - but I think you're being a bit hyperbolic about "tearing society apart" and "resulting in far more deaths and misery". This is the sort of rhetoric that Trump has been using - whilst I agree in principle there is economic pain - please don't treat people's lives as meaningless, or that the almighty dollar is all that matters. It's the job of governments to guide the country through these crises - this is where government stimulus and spending should be used - not just letting people die needlessly.
COVID-19 is a new and novel disease that's highly spreadable, has no known vaccine, and is killing an unprecedented number of people.
And we're not just talking about yourself - perhaps you're young/healthy and are prepared to contract COVID-19 and roll the dice.
However, those around you - family, or friends - may not be so lucky, or it could be a potentially life-threatening condition. Please think about people around you.
The US death toll is nearly 100,000....
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-24/coronavirus-update-co...
That is absolutely heartbreaking.
That is over 30x the death toll from the 9/11 plane attacks - and look what lengths the government went to combat that?
I just got my second COVID-19 test (fortunately came back negative) - my parents (who are older and vulnerable) are paranoid I'll give it to them. So when I got a sore throat, I went to get the test. And a few weeks back, my son had a cough, so I got myself tested.
Our government (Australia) is encouraging people with any symptoms to get tested - and I think that's a good thing, towards eradicating this illness.
Black death.
Bubonic plague.
Smallpox.
Malaria.
Measles.
Polio.
There have been many more virulent and many more destructive diseases than this one. Malaria in particular has been so destructive over thousands of years that it has modified human populations, forcing observable natural selection for traits such as sickle-cell anemia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria
And in many developing countries, there are tragically many deaths caused by poor sanitation or healthcare.
However, this is a disease that has - even with incredibly draconian lockdowns and a global effort from every country to combat it - tragically killed nearly 350,000 people in a matter of months. And this is often in countries with state of the art healthcare systems, and every effort made to keep those people alive.
And as another commenter pointed out, this is often in countries not used to such scale of health disasters, as they have healthcare and good sanitation. Ironically, I read that things like air travel and holidays actually worsened illnesses like this.
Imagine if we'd simply let the diseases run its course.
The thing that baffles me is the US - advanced Western nation - with a death toll of nearly 100,000 people. How is that even possible?
I am hoping we've seen the worst of it.
AIDS has killed around 34 million people since 1981.
That's on average 100k deaths per year since 1981.
Right now we are in our first quarter of covid19 and the official death count is at 340k.
So I suppose somewhat like the situation in the US with COVID-19 today.
Polio.
"On Saturday, June 17, 1916, an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[15] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio
Measles too. These are diseases that hit the western world, the rich countries, killed thousands, in living memory. They causes panic. They caused quarantines. They caused social change. Polio lead directly to the disability rights movement. Wheelchair ramps as mandatory in all buildings: that's from polio.
But to your point about the economy, we are seeing unprecedented damage to the worldwide economy from the shutdowns. It's not the virus that's doing this. It's the shutdowns. 40 million people are unemployed in the U.S. alone and rising, rapidly. This is unsustainable. The economy has to function or everything falls apart. And a big part of that functioning is travel and tourism and restaurants and it creates value and moves trade along. It's very important to re-establish those things.
Much of those deaths are in nursing homes with extremely vulnerable populations. I think its a tragic shame that many of these outbreaks occurred especially in nursing homes all over the northeast (NY, NJ, PA, CT, etc). However, once a patient gets moved to a nursing home, the average length they live is about 1 year. We can make nursing homes cleaner and safer and we should probably get those patients outside a bit more, but there's also only so much that can be done for people in the last months of their life.
If you walk into the space previously breathed in by an infected person (or even if you just stand a couple of metres away from them) you will still indeed be breathing some infected droplets, but far less than if you stood closer to them. The result is not just that you chance of being infected is less, but that it is disproportionately less. This is born out in the observed consequences of social distancing in many countries. It's pointless to dispute it.
Forgive me for being presumptuous, but I suspect that this isn't really the point of your comment or the main reason for your view. I suspect that you think social distancing is a bad policy even if it does prevent infection. So I suggest against tacking on "oh and by the way it doesn't really prevent infection anyway", which is obviously not true; you're only weakening your credibility which undermines your main point.
it doesn't mean you won't get it outside that radius or that you will get it inside that radius, just that the opportunity to catch it is increased or decreased based on distance.
You can easily smell cigar smoke at 10 meters but you are ver unlikely to get infected at the same distance, current estimates put it to 4 meters in hospital settings.
Also,the amount of virus you receive matters, and distance decreases it.
The smoke analogy is not perfect, as it's composition is less moist, but it is closer to the truth than the '6 foot' model that was itself already a compromise between the now accepted as disproved macro fluid projectile model and economic concerns.
"The particles in tobacco smoke are liquid aerosol droplets (~ 20% water), ..."
So, sharing a room with someone sick probably gives you a high chance of encountering the virus, but outdoors one hopes the concentrations would be so low that our bodies can fight it off.
And if you're wearing a mask and can still smell cigarette smoke, then surely it means that mask would let the virus particles through as well.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/13/how-coronavirus-sprea...
Clearly a lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus.
TBH, I have yet to hear a decent argument against this, given the following thoughts:
1. Development of a vaccine will take a minimum of 12 months, more like 18.
2. It is not feasible, either for democracy or our economy, to stay locked in/sheltered at home for this long.
3. Thus, the main concern should be to "flatten the curve": keep the infection rate low enough so that, even though people still get infected, hospital systems don't get overwhelmed. I think it's important to note that the only places yet that have had overwhelmed (or close to it) hospital systems had extreme density (Wuhan, NYC), often coupled with lots of mixing of young and old (Northern Italy).
4. A corollary to number 3 is that as long as hospital systems aren't overwhelmed, or close to it, that you shouldn't lock down further. The belief is that the majority of society becoming infected within 12/18 months is inevitable, so extreme lockdowns will do little beyond push deaths out a bit.
5. Do everything you can to protect the highly vulnerable (old, immuno-compromised) as they appear to be at exponential greater risk.
I mean, as the US starts to open up, it is quite clear the virus has not been contained, so for better or for worse the above is the approach we are taking as well.
Herd immunity only happens when a critical mass of the population - >70% at a minimum - is given immunity by a vaccine.
This creates a population with a low enough R to guarantee that outbreaks die out, even if some people aren't vaccinated.
Even then it still doesn't guarantee personal immunity, because people in small clusters can still become infected. But instead of a national health emergency which threatens to overwhelm primary care, you get small localised individual/cluster outbreaks which are very much easier to handle.
I think you've got a selection bias there. Those illnesses are household names because they are/were so prevalent. But what of the illnesses that never became prevalent enough to become household names because populations developed immunity fast enough to suppress the spread?
I can't think of any.
We are deeply embarrassed about Sweden.
Supposedly, Singapore and South Korea were proof that this could work anyway, but it seems to have failed in both places - Singapore had to give up and lock down after cases exploded, whilst South Korea also had a whole bunch of spread that completely escaped contact tracing and nowhere near enough testing to pick it back up again, but somehow managed to reverse it through stricter social distancing measures well short of a full lockdown for reasons no-one has explained. I'd be very interested to see what serology studies have to say about South Korea's actual infection rate.
It is hard to imagine SK's infection rate is anything other than very small, given their extremely low death rate (264 for a pop of ~50MM) - to insinuate otherwise is, well, questionable.
Sadly a different dimension has crept into what should be a reasoned public health emergency response. I'm not sure from where, or why, or indeed who - but we should be vigilant, the cost is terrible.
Unfortunately once you scare everyone into locking down you can't reverse course on a dime.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Los-Angeles...
https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-14/antibody-study...
Most studies in Europe show this: 0,5 - 1.
Though I'd be cautious about being too confident in antibody study results, for now. A lot can depend on test accuracy (especially where covid is rare anyway).
This was their criticized quote:
> Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died
It was true.
And no the lockdown isn't about "lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus", it is about keeping the pace of the tiny fraction of infections that go bad to under the capacity of the NHS / ICUs. At least that was the stated goal. It seems now that we have switched to a goal of zero infection (and not sure that it makes sense, given that I hear the WHO now refering to this virus as an "endemic disease").
This is just completely wrong. It's a useful exercise to work out how many people would need to die before herd immunity could be achieved. Use mortality numbers based on what we've learned about the virus and estimates of what percentage of the population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity based on the behavior of any number of other viruses.
And that's assuming infection confers immunity with this virus, which we don't know yet.
As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. With appropriate isolation we could absolutely achieve herd immunity with minimal losses. Instead we have sent covid infected patients back in nursing homes in both the US and the UK with catastrophic results.
The numbers don't look very immaterial to me. [1] Granted there's a weird amount of variance between regions and there's a lot that isn't certain.
> If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown?
(Let's hope some reasonable amount of immunity is conferred! It seems likely, but I think it's useful to consider the worst case.)
I'd be happy with people doing what they ought to be doing anyway: exercising some caution and doing the obvious things to limit the spreading of the bug. I'm in a constant state of amazement at how bad we are at all of this.
In the crazy worst case where there isn't much immunity conferred by the infection, we could hopefully rely on Darwin to eventually provide us with a less dangerous version of the virus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mort...
You're looking at the numbers for the case fatality rates (CFR). The CFR is not the same as the infection fatality rates (IFR) which represent "the fatality rate in all those with infection: the detected disease (cases) and those with an undetected disease (asymptomatic and not tested group)... The IFR will always be lower than the CFR..."[1]
Spanish government ran a seroprevalence study and got the following estimates of COVID-19's IFR[2]:
For the age group under 50, the estimated IFR is about 0.003%
For the age group 50 - 69 yo, it's 0.04%
And for those over 70, it's 4.1%
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate#Terminology
[2] https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... Look for the table on page 15
Does the document break out IFR-S? Some news came out in recent days indicating IFR-S in the United States was around 1.3%.
I agree, 4% IFR of people over 70 is a scary number. In my opinion, governments around the world should really focus on protecting these people.
The good news is for people under 70 personal danger from the virus is close to zero.
"Does the document break out IFR-S?"
Don't know, sorry. Deciphering that table is really easy as the column names are almost the same as the English terms. And Google Translate does a really good job on the footnotes.
But reading the whole paper I'll have to leave to someone who actually reads Spanish.
I feel like I'm missing some key context that would lead a person to declare that with any sense of certainty. It's on a chart and everything! But it's not in agreement with everybody else's charts, and it's early days when it comes to the epidemiology.
(and at least in the US, our treatment capabilities are vast, but our testing regime is cartoonishly bad)
I haven't seen any other IFR estimate that included a breakdown by age group from a government or another authoritative source. Do you have anything particular in mind?
Is it a certain thing the risk for people under 70 is close to zero? Strictly speaking, no, it isn't.
It's unlikely we're going to see precise IFR numbers any time soon. But countries around the world are lifting lockdowns. Where I am, they're lifting it too. So I'll have to evaluate my personal risks without full information.
Why do I tend to rely on Spanish numbers?
- They are one of the hardest hit countries. If they had relatively few fatalities in the age group under 70, it must be reasonable to assume other countries aren't going to have significantly more.
- Don't have a link handy, but numbers published by Italian government had similar numbers of fatalities per each age group. (They didn't try to estimate IFR, though.)
- I don't think Spanish govt manipulates their numbers. But -- if anything -- they have an incentive to overestimate the IFR to justify one of the strictest lockdowns and a high number of dead.
I'm privileged enough, to be working from home. And staying as safe possible. I just think bad economy can ultimately take lives (not only livelihoods) of more people than COVID-19.
But one difference with the Spanish documents is they don't estimate their IFRs.
And if I'm not missing anything, doing it yourself is not trivial if possible at all. It's not enough to know that 5% (an arbitrary number, just to give an example) of a country's population developed antibodies. You'd also need to know the age structure of those 5%, which may or may not match the country's age structure.
Yes, modeling prevalence is complex but once you have the total estimated infected then finding IFR becomes trivial. Calculating SMR would be much more difficult.
Many (most?) countries do not produce reports in English but only in their native language.
When you search in the native language then it is easier to find relevant data. Especially when you catch the right keywords they use.
Here is 14th May report https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... that is referenced below the table.
For some reason they chose to use total from the page 3, 19.155 total by age not 27.321, total by region from page 2. I presume that they do not know the details of about 8000 diseased, but it does not matter when it is the total number.
Again while number of >= 70 year old matches the table on the page 3 - 16559, so do age groups <10 and 10-19 but other numbers do not.
The table on the page 15 contains only 263 from the age group 50-69 but the table on the 14th May report contains 2303. The IFR for this age group would be then 0.32%. Not very big but not negligible either.
Group 20-49 contains only 23 people from the 20-29 but omits 62 people from the group 30-39 and 201 people from the group 40-49. The IFR for this age group would be then 0.03%.
I don't really understand why they are using numbers from one table and not the other.
I guess, it may be related to the dates they conducted the seroprevalence study, but it's only a wild guess.
I'll try to look through the documents more carefully later, maybe there's an explanation.
Here is 14th May report https://www.mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/saludPublica/ccayes/a... that is referenced below the table.
For some reason they chose to use total from the page 3, 19.155 total by age not 27.321, total by region from page 2. I presume that they do not know the details of about 8000 diseased, but it does not matter when it is the total number.
Again while number of >= 70 year old matches the table on the page 3 - 16559, so do age groups <10 and 10-19 but other numbers do not.
The table on the page 15 contains only 263 from the age group 50-69 but the table on the 14th May report contains 2303. The IFR for this age group would be then 0.32%. Not very big but not negligible either.
Group 20-49 contains only 23 people from the 20-29 but omits 62 people from the group 30-39 and 201 people from the group 40-49. The IFR for this age group would be then 0.03%.
There is no practical way to "isolate the sick and the elderly" when there are no supplies of PPE or testing kits for care workers. The whole point is that the sick and elderly need care, and when there's a pandemic that care requires extra measures to prevent the spread of infection.
In reality the government did the exact opposite - knowingly sending elderly people with Covid infections back to care homes, and then saying "Oh that's nothing to do with us - every move was signed off by a clinician."
And that in turn makes even less sense when you realise that tens of millions were spent on Covid-ready Nightingale Hospitals, which were opened to great fanfare - and then literally left empty, while old people were being sent to nursing homes to infect others.
Evil, or "simply" stupid and incompetent? It doesn't even matter any more A lot of people are dead for no good reason, and far more are going to die in the UK before this is over.
2017 flu had 60k deaths, despite likely undercounting.
As Nietzsche once put it: “insanity is rare in individuals, but common in the herd”
you could be severely sick with some other disease then get COVID19 in addition, what killed you?
I think 10 years from now we will look back at this time as the time where everything was counted as COVID19
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
These data are subject to being modified after the fact.
This still makes sense if the lockdown has lowered other causes of death like car crashes.
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...
I don't mean to say that Covid is not a problem -- of course it is. But the response is not correct given the magnitude and nature of the problem.
To me it seems like massive government investment in protecting at risk populations is the answer.
A non-trivial proportion of those become seriously ill for months. It's possible they're going be left with permanent health problems.
I know of one music app developer in his forties with no health issues who spent more than a month on a ventilator. He recovered - barely - but it's going to be a while before he's back to working full-time.
Nonsense about flu statistics is just ignorable whataboutery. Covid is a very nasty illness, and until a vaccine is developed it has potential to do huge direct damage.
Without lockdowns it would have spread like wildfire and a lot of people would have been off work at the same time. Some food supply chains in the US are already struggling.
Imagine what would have happened with only ten times more casualties.
This seems a very difficult point for most people.
Early on, we had an exponential rise in cases and it appeared we would overwhelm hospitals. Therefore quarantine orders were issued (rather delayed imo) to offset the growth and allow hospitals to not have more cases than beds/equipment.
We had a lot less data initially and had to be proactive. The initial call was correct, and slowly easing it with monitoring is correct now.
it is totally disingenous to suggest that anyone actually proposing the "lockdown" claimed that it was about eradicating it or waiting for it to pass (both of which are widely understood to be absurd goals at this time).
One they are being scared into thinking that if they get infected they will die a horrible death and so will everyone around them. This is obviously an exaggeration because for people under 40 the vast majority will not even notice the infection. And please if you reply grasping at the straw of ‘some people are ill for long’ specify how many people and if they are seriously ill or just tired for a long time.
Second they are not in a position to set policy. The people who make the rules are even more scared and make the rules much tighter than is useful.
We know that sars-cov-2 is highly contagious - R0 values up above 2 without any action. This means that with no action, the entire population will be infected rapidly. Out of the entire population a certain percentage will have no symptoms. Another group will have mild symptoms. Another group will have severe symptoms. Another group will require hospitalization. Members of the last two groups will die.
The point of current public policy (at least from the POV of the people smart enough to understand and propose it) has been to decrease R0 so that it takes much longer for the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway unless an effective vaccine appears quickly). Why would we want to do that? Because if the entire population is rapidly infected, the numbers requiring hospitalization would vastly exceed the resources of our medical system. That means that:
1. Some of those who might have survived COVID-19 had they received effective hospital care will die. 2. People with other treatements requiring hospital care will find it difficult or impossible to receive it, leading to more deaths from non-COVID-19 causes.
None of this has anything to do with "if they get infected they will die a horrible death and so will everyone around them" - that's nothing but a silly strawman painted by people who, for some reason, want to downplay the risk of allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population.
Everywhere you see governments building up these huge emergency hospitals and then tearing them down again without them being used.
If your story were true they’d keep the hospitals and loosen restrictions to maximize use, saving the economy while keeping a safe margin.
> allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population
Sounds so scary but
> the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway)
Is the same thing, but put in a not scary manner.
These people making the rules are not as smart as you think they are. When the rules were made there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of pressure to take action. Logically some of the rules work and some don’t. Truly smart people would just say ‘oh well we will remove the rules that don’t work’. Instead what you see is clinging to ineffective rules, defending them with poor excuses as doing otherwise means admitting you were wrong.
In the US, look at mr. Cuomo and his indefensible failure of sending infected old people to nursing homes. It’s clearly the worst thing to do and look at his reaction now that the results are in! He just says he didn’t know even though his signature is on the page ordering it. How smart is that.
> allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population
puts a very concrete time estimate on it. We know that the SARS-CoV-2 replicates every 4 days on average, so this scenario has a doubling of cases every 4 days. Starting from a single infected person, the US would become completely infected in roughly 120 days, i.e. they would roughly be done by this point or early next month, with all the consequences that entails. In contrast,
> the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway)
does not imply any specific timeline. It could happen in 30 days, it could happen in 30 weeks, it could happen in 30 years.
Handwaving nonsense. You said that, not people advocating for serious and sensible public policy re: COVID-19.
> "Sounds so scary ..."
Have you actually listened to the people who had COVID-19 and recovered from more than mild symptoms? If there was an army or a terrorist group about to invade the US and kill 100k people, mostly at random, I suspect you'd consider that fairly "scary", as would most other people.
> "Is the same thing..."
As noted by another sibling comment, no it's not the same thing at all.
> "... there was a lot of uncertainty ..."
There is still a lot of uncertainty. We don't really know what works and what doesn't work. What you characterize as "clinging to ineffective rules" I would characterize as "trying to be cautious in the face of massive uncertainty".
I would never defend all of Cuomo's actions as NY Governor. He made a number of extremely serious errors, even though his demeanour in his later press briefings was exemplary.
Yet there are the unnamed but great
> people advocating for serious and sensible public policy re: COVID-19.
According to you these people have no idea what they are doing. Indeed if you believe that, the only way to go is to keep doing nothing out of caution.
And it is not like under 60s are all that safe. In the US 25% of deaths are under 65.
More or less infeasible than throwing millions of people out of work and forbidding everyone from seeing their friends and families?
And it is not like under 60s are all that safe. In the US 25% of deaths are under 65.
85% of the US population is under 65. So 15% of the population has 75% of the deaths, meaning a randomly selected person over 65 is 17 times more likely to have died than a random person under 65.
For politicians it was just easier to lock us all in because such measures are more accepted by the public if everyone has to give up and not just a few. On the other hand, the lockdown for all created so much noise that we didn't focus enough on those at risk and easing their lockdown in some way. Even Sweden got it wrong by banning visits to elderly homes only by late March.
Besides the lockdown for elderly (and a growing list of others at risk) I wish they'd broken up elderly and care homes where-ever possible. If just half the residents moved to a younger relative for a year (and pay the relative for their work, obviously) the homes might not be those death traps they are.
Here in Austria the government worked a lot with Angst. It went so far that the younger were more afraid of the virus than the elderly. I had to spend days to persuade a 35-yr-old that she doesn't have to be afraid and from her initial "I don't want this virus" position she moved to "I already had it" six weeks after...
Young people in their 20's and 30's are dying too, just at a lower percentage.
Many young people who survive COVID-19 end up with permanent lung damage and other on-going issues.
A New York Times staffer who's 33-years old ran 3 miles and walked 10 more the day before she came down with COVID-19 on April 17.
And now this: "I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping."—https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/coronavirus-young...
Far lower. It may be still undesirable, but if we want to talk about risk, there is no absence of risk for anyone, yet the risk changes a lot depending on age and comorbidities. This matters if one wants to take the risk or not, given that it will never be zero.
> Many young people who survive COVID-19 end up with permanent lung damage and other on-going issues.
Some of these issues apply to any type of pneumonia. It takes a year or so to fully recover if you had a bad one. And to evaluate "permanent" damage, we need more time. It would be better to say "we don't know yet if the damage is permanent or not".
You had me up to that one. It does mean you're likely to require hospitalization if you have severe Covid symptoms. You may not require a weeks long stay in the ICU and you may not require a ventilator. If you have severe symptoms, you're at a very elevated risk of death. This is why so many young people have been hospitalized by it as a percentage of all cases ending up in the ICU, even though they're still far more likely to live through the severe symptoms.
If you're in those categories by all means, update your will and self-isolate. But otherwise you'll do fine. Even the healthy elderly, and there are plenty of them, do fine.
Such a case is very unusual and I would question severely the use of "young and healthy" to describe such a person. Sorry if that seems harsh but naming is meaningful here.
So while there are relatively few Covid-19 patients and even fewer Covid-19 deaths, there are indeed a minuscule percentage of such cases. It's not worth worrying about for the average person.
Indeed that is the point: Covid-19 odds are so low that there is no reason for a normal intelligent person to be unduly concerned about catching Covid-19. Take precautions and go about your business. Truth is you're more likely to get killed in a car accident than by Covid-19.
The real problem may be characterised by the fact that half of the population has an IQ below 100. However as a society we've given up on eugenics, so that is a path not chosen!
In the US during 2018 there were ~36,000 auto fatalities. For the first half of 2020 Covid-19 is nearing 100,000 deaths with all the precautions. And there may be a surprising number of people with health complications of one kind or another (over 30% of US population is obese) that could be exacerbated by this virus.
> The real problem may be characterised by the fact that half of the population has an IQ below 100. However as a society we've given up on eugenics, so that is a path not chosen!
We are stronger when we work together. Suggesting that the government regulate procreation to increase society's IQ is ... not going to help toward that end.
If you are discharged from a hospital and require rehabilitation you will probably be placed in some form of nursing facility with other patients who may or may not have been infected.
The last part is the hidden disaster of the COVID-19 crisis.
Isn't "requiring hospitalization" pretty much the definition of "severe symptoms"? As far as I can tell, when doctors talk about "mild symptoms", that can include anything from a mild cough to weeks of heavy fever, muscle pains, ... .
But more importantly: even if you're complete asymptomatic, you're still very likely to infect other people and contribute to the spread of the virus and the disease. That's bad for other people's health, causes extra deaths, is bad for the economy, and generally makes everything worse for everybody including yourself.
True, if you are scared then by all mean isolate yourself, do not meet other people.
>causes extra deaths
Assume, in the worse case everyone infected, the estimated death rate is only 1%, that's not going to make difference to most people life or the economy.
And most other causes are not simultaneously sending several multiples of that number to the hospital, or spreading like wildfire in same hospital.
> The question Fenner asked was: What happens when such a virulent virus spreads through a very susceptible host species on a continental scale? He focused on two possibilities. First, the highly lethal virus might evolve to become less lethal. Second, the highly susceptible rabbits might evolve resistance. Thanks to Fenner, we now know both happened.
> The work showed that the almost invariably lethal progenitor virus strain was replaced within a few years by strains with case fatality rates of 70 percent to 95 percent. Some field isolates killed fewer than half the lab rabbits. Over the next few decades, things settled down, and strains at both ends of the lethality spectrum become increasingly difficult to find. Fenner showed why. The highly lethal progenitor virus killed rabbits so fast that its infectious period was shorter than that of the less lethal viral mutants. That meant that the less lethal strains were able to infect more new victims and spread throughout the population.
Edit: as an example, my county (Santa Clara) is using under 10% of hospital beds for Covid. This is typical, check your county dashboard if they have one and you are likely to see a similar number. Source: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...
One reason Sweden's approach may work out in the end is they have the highest proportion of single person households of any country on Earth.
Was it? NYC has reported more deaths than Lombardy (with less population) and NY/NJ as many deaths as Italy with half the population.
So far all the places that have had hospital systems overwhelmed (or on the verge) have had extremely high density, lots of intergenerational mixing, or both.
It may work out for them because it's a lowly populated country but I wouldn't try that model anywhere with an higher density.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/21/just-7-per-cen...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-coronavirus-per-capit...
- Japan is populated extremely densely[2].
- Japan is number 2 by the population's median age (for comparison, Italy is 5th)[3].
- Japan had 808(!) COVID-19 fatalities[4].
- Despite the lockdown, in New York "most new coronavirus hospitalizations are people who had been staying home"[5].
- New York had 29112(!) deaths[6].
One just has to ask, do lockdowns even have that big of an impact on the spread of the virus? Or did it just ran its natural course in each country -- in lockdown or not -- and differences in the numbers of deaths are just down to dumb chance?
"... there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities..."[7]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/did-japan...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...
[4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/japan/
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/ny-gov-cuomo-says-its-shocki...
[6] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-york/
[7] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-coronavirus-...
What kind of differences do you have in mind for Japan given their population of ~126 millions, density and median age?
"One can not and should not simply cherrypick situations and arguments to support one's case."
I don't think the fallacy of cherrypicking applies here. One counter example is enough to challenge a hypothesis and ask very serious questions about it. I gave two -- Japan and people staying at home and still getting infected in NY.
Do these counterexamples immediately disporve lockdowns effectiveness? I don't think so.
Do they mean some very strong evidence is necessary to confirm the effectiveness? In my opinion, absolutely.
"Cyprus initiated a lockdown far earlier than London, and they have had 17 (0.0014% of the population) deaths so far."
I'm going to give an absurd example but consistent with this line of reasoning.
So, I claim the Sun still rises thanks to lockdown, and as a result of initiating their lockdown earlier the Sun is brighter over Cyprus. So does the Sun still rise everyday? Yes. Is it brighter over Cyprus? Yes. Hence, my claim is proven!
Sweden has a very low population density on average, but they also have some densely packed metro areas. Just the Stockholm and Gothenburg metro areas make up over a third of the total population.
Who would choose to die now without a "lockdown" when the other option is die later with a lockdown, including the added bonus of there being more work done to understand the virus and how to treat it, which might mean not dying at all.
0.1% of the rest of my life is less than three weeks, it's not a bad gamble to avoid an 18-month lockdown if that were the choice.
Umm, lots of people? If we prohibited all vehicle traffic we would prevent 1.3 million deaths worldwide, yet lots of people appear willing to drive.
Look, I don't mean to minimize the deaths, and the lockdowns were a very rational response given what was known initially. At the same time, humans make risky choices all the time, and it's not unreasonable to ask if the cost of the lockdowns is worth the lowered risk, especially in lower-density locales.
Sure, seems a bit extreme though. I suggest we remove all the safety features on cars, it costs the car companies loads in R&D to comply with all those regulations. You take a risk when you drive, and to be honest people should just be better drivers and there will be less accidents.
Far less accidents in lower-density locales as well.
I'm not sure what's the basis of your idea.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/mayo-clinic-furlough-or-cut-...
All the field hospitals in the UK and US have been now closed.
This is direct, primary source data, not a media report.
That you say it's not the case while linking to only your own county.. feels bad.
There is a lot of pent up health care need building up. Some of it lethal.
The impact of the lockdown is going to be 10-100x that of coronavirus itself. No healthcare system is prepared for it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/23/missouri-hai...
It’s already happening
Addendum: and we have financial tools to deal with the economic stress. We don’t have much in the way of treatment for the virus yet.
The fact that we’re not throwing money at the unemployed is a crime.
But you blew it with those crazy numbers..
Eventually-eventually, but if it turns out immunity lasts a year and 10% of the population has had it next February, you'll never get herd immunity until people say "fuck it."
Compare with Ebola. They don't have Ebola in Europe. But if it pops up somewhere, we will contain it as soon as possible.
It doesn't mean that they need to live in isolation for the rest of time.
Millions of people with Corona are asymptomatic or have mild flu-like symptoms and are therefore easy carriers.
OTOH once you have Ebola symptoms (and that's when you are infectious), you have only a coin's flip chance of surviving it. You can be pretty sure no random guy on the street is giving you Ebola. You can't say the same for Corona.
It has been widely reported since the very beginning of the pandemic that the likely time to develop and deploy a vaccine is on the order of 18 months. Yes, it might be more, it might also be less (quite a few are already in testing!). But the idea that this is permanent has never been a feature of any expert advice nor mainstream reporting.
The idea that the people who support lockdowns (which is, let's be clear, almost everyone) want to be shut down forever is, itself, a fever swamp hallucination.
Stay home until it's beaten, and then open up slowly so we don't lose control again. Much of the world outside the US and the UK, in fact, is already opening up.
The problem with London are the aristocratic measures of social distancing. The danger of being caughed at at low distance is exponential. The recommendation is 1-2 meter. The UK did 2m, likely because the ones who came with that idea never use public transport, and want to be safe from the plebs. Face masks don't help at all against direct caughing. only against droplets.
2m distancing doesn't work in public places at all. 1 - 1.5m do work, if in the subway, bus, restaurant, pub somehow. I don't know who else did 2m. And the death mortality is directly proportional to the severity of the measures. Maybe not causal, but those are the numbers. 2m don't help at all. When you are being caughed at, it goes far over 5m, even up to 20m. So social distancing in public places does not help much. indirect caughing via droplets is not that dangerous, transmission via surfaces at very low percentages. there's no known case so far. but hard to prove.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/19/scie...
Lifting prohibition wasn't going to make alcoholism disappear.
Lifting the war on drugs won't make overdoses disappear.
There are many things we could do in society to make negative externalities that cause hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths disappear. Yet we don't do those.
If anything it only gives the anti-vaxxers more ammunition and brings down the overall credibility of vaccination as a concept, and heaven knows we don't want to deal with that right now.
I tend to agree that there is some potential for fuckups, but 12-18 months seem reasonable to have most (if not all) of the vaccines as reliable.
For example, the Oxford University team said it may be ready by next fall[0] some weeks ago, and they seem on track for now (i.e. human trials already started and being expanded). Moderna also started human trials and had preliminary positive results.
Other entities said they aim for this winter.
Considering early 2020 as the start of the research I would say that fits the 12-18 months figure.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-11/coronavir...