If you aren't sufficiently worried, John Campbell has a video about the clinical presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7BbXEOB1gk
edit: thanks!
The CFR for coronaplague is ~ 1 %, comparable to the Spanish Flu in Germany. The impact was catastrophic, the High Command had to decide between sending young men to the front or keeping them at work in coal and steel. In those days there was little automation, the infection would spread like wildfire through the workforce at any large employer. The only reason we aren't seeing the same now is that people adhere to some form of social distancing - work from home, no going out to bars, no gym, no church, kids are not in school, but as soon as guard is dropped infection rates jump up again. We are seeing this as well. Israel had new cases down to 1 per 100000 people until they opened up the schools and cases increased by two orders of magnitude.
We shut down cancer screening and gyms for 3 months in Ontario; that’s almost certainly going to kill more people than COVID did.
If there are ~1 million gym patrons in Ontario, then the gym lockdown (which is still ongoing) only needs to decrease a gym patron's lifespan by 10 days on average to be worse than COVID.
Also, I claimed cancer screenings + gyms combined. Hundreds of people get diagnosed with malignant tumors every day in Ontario and those tumors are now 3 months more advanced than they should be (and will be for a long time after the lockdown until the queues for medical care clear up).
At an avg lifespan of 78 years, 100 kids is ~68 million hours. 30 minutes saved a day / 261 days / year for 75,000 people is ~9.7 million hours a year, so after 7 years, it basically free. Except we would never do that because we don't measure human value in hours because the people in power would be free to make some really terrible optimizations.
You are right though, you did include cancers and I ignored it so we can call it a tie.
Edit: and it's not just the gym obviously, we've removed any incidental exercise one might get from work or leisure activities that were locked down too
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...
Those are absolutely moving deaths forward by a couple months at best.
I'd be willing to put money on a fair amount of the rest of the deaths also being people who are pretty ill. Not all, of course.
Maybe not even most of the rest.
But enough to not be a rounding error.
The fact that the numbers don't seem that dramatic yet doesn't mean that measures to slow the progress of the virus aren't important.
[1] - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-20/newsom-c...
[2] - https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/san-jose-braces-for-2000-...
You've made a classic converse error.
The US didn't devolve into mass graves and people dying waiting for hospital care yet, it doesn't mean that the fearmongering is misplaced and the more you doubt it the more you will be part of the problem.
No, we are not setting death records day after day. Deaths worldwide have held steady since mid May; deaths in the US have been trending downwards since May.
But that's not the only driver. And when you increase testing and the percentage of positives you find goes up from 5% to 20% (as it's happening in some states) instead of going down you really have a problem.
> The people getting infected now, the out-and-abouters, are much, much lower risk of complications.
But the people that will now be infected by them (relatives, coworkers, customers) will be closer to the general population and have higher risk.
I think more significantly they're driven by total cases. Are you suggesting we test less?
Also you seem to have a very black and white view of outcomes. It's not clear cut between alive or dead. There's many things that we still don't know about this virus and the harm it causes. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-ef...
Of course this is a case where no long term effects are something we are only sure of after currently young people die of old age.
Or do you work with the concept "long term = next quarter"?
Young people are generally on the front lines now. Both voluntarily through outings, bars, etc, and front-line jobs, so they are a leading indicator that "things are getting worse."
And while that doesn't guarantee that most "at risk" people will get sick and require hospitalization, it's a safe assumption that the probability of that occurring is increasing.
It's the same reason you get a mole checked out. Might be nothing now, but it could be something much worse in the near future.
That depends which numbers you follow. "Cases" is different than "clinical cases". A clinical case will show some sort of symptom. While asymptomatic spread is almost certainly a thing, symptomatic patients spread much more readily than asymptomatic. So rather than look only a total cases, look for data on clinical cases because those are the ones that are most likely to spread to others. That will normally be patients under treatment rather than the larger number of people who have tested positive, show no real symptoms, and are sitting at home waiting for another test.
Daily case numbers in Illinois, at least, have no correlation with the increase in testing. I'm certain all we've found with the extra tests is people who never had it.
The logic behind this is that people are going to the hospital whether or not they have been tested, they are not going to stay away because they haven't been. I don't have easy access to numbers of hospitalized patients, so I watch the number of deaths. Right now they have been flattening out or decreasing, as you pointed out. When that changes I'll get worried more. In either case, I am playing it safe by social distancing and wearing my mask and reducing the amount of time I'm in the office.
White people under 50, to be specific. As many as 50% of new hospitalizations in Texas are under 50.
The problem will be if they infect higher risk groups, potentially in catastrophic numbers, and the deaths surge along with cases.
Also, deaths remaining somewhat flat is concerning considering the low risk population getting infected.
The number of reported or confirmed cases is correlated with testing.
That's a significantly different statement, and also tautological and essentially vacuous.
Average time to death after confirmation of disease is around 13 days, so the death rate today has essentially nothing to do with the number of cases confirmed today. The death rate today has a lot to do with the number of cases confirmed a few weeks ago.
One of the reasons the US is doing so incredibly poorly is the incredible sloppiness of the analyses in so much of the media. I don't know if it's willful -- an attempt to pretend that nature will bend to political delusion -- or if it's simple innumeracy.