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The quora answer [1] by Franklin Veaux to question "How can a disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States?" explains nicely that it is not binary live/die at all. Mind though that this was written in the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have the same information as now, so numbers may be imprecise, but the explanation still stands.

https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-shu...

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Even if no one died and people only went to the hospital, a huge issue is that they are there in the hospital in need of care and there are finite trained hands in the hospital. Not to mention you still have everyone else coming in with their car accidents and heart attacks at the same time.

Better questions to think about are why the U.S. medical system supporting the words largest economy can't trivially expand its capacity to treat a relatively benign respiratory virus on top of its usual duties, or why there is a shortage in the training pipeline, or why people need ER care for other things in the first place.

Nobody wants to get the disease which POSSIBLY could kill them or put them to hospital and perhaps financially bankrupt them and or give them bad long-term health outcomes. That has an effect on the behavior of everybody, except of course those who believe Covid is a "democratic hoax".

Also with an evolving disease you don't know what its death-rate will be and it will depend on the preventive measures you and the government take, one of which is "shutting down" another being vaccination, which was not available at the beginning. If there had been no vaccine surely the death-rate had been larger.

According to data below the mortality rate is 7.5% in Mexico. In US it is 1.5%, not 1% as implied by whoever posed the question.

"Shutting down" will affect the mortality-rate because presumably it will protect the most vulnerable population more. If they don't get infected the mortality rate will be smaller.

And as far as I can tell US was never really "shut down" was it? Everybody still got their groceries. Many died of Covid, nobody died of hunger I believe. Subways and buses were running.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

> mortality rate is 7.5% in Mexico

That is probably the CFR (case fatality rate). This depends on actually testing. If you don't test mild or asymptomatic cases, the mortality will look way larger.

But we know the actual global mortality, is about 0.7%.

A link to that data would be nice thanks

You appear to be confused about the true mortality rate. The page you linked gives case fatality rates, which are irrelevant due to lack of testing. The vast majority of infections were never tested, and thus never counted as cases. The CDC estimated the real fatality rate at 0.6%. Vaccines and other improved therapies are now pushing that fatality rate lower.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Everyone will get infected. Shutting down can only delay that.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

Shutting down can prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed so they can also take care of other emergencies besides Covid.

Let's say you get to a serious car accident. But the hospital can not take you because it is full of Covid patients.

How many serious car accidents do you typically get into per year?

Times have changed, we are more sensitive now to death.

In the past it was considered normal to lose 50k soldiers in a war, have 3 of your kids die as infants, ...

Also note that COVID has killed more people than combat deaths in all U.S. wars combined. U.S. COVID death toll is now 826K, combat death toll for major U.S. wars is a total of 666K: 291K for WW2, 214K for the Civil War, 53K for WW1, 47K for Vietnam, 33K for Korea, and then numbers start getting negligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

It's also passed the death toll in the U.S. from the Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 675K (although this was out of a smaller total population).

It doesn't take a very large death toll to have a major impact on American society.

COVID has averaged a “9/11” amount of deaths every 2-3 days for what, 21 months? The actual single 9/11 event caused us to panic, pass the Patriot Act, and invade two random middle eastern countries. But somehow Americans are fine with a 9/11 sized catastrophe over and over.

It's already widely recognized that death toll figure is died 'with' COVID, not died 'from' COVID, which is okay as a number in itself. However direct comparison using such figure is disingenuous.

Died from COVID is likely even higher than the official death toll. The best metric for this is 2020-2021 excess deaths, subtracting the expected death rate from actual observed deaths. This number is 936K, so about 110K more than I suggested.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

You also can view the weekly totals for observed and predicted deaths on that site. You'll see that deaths from non-COVID causes track the predicted value quite well, but when you add in deaths from COVID, the curve follows the timing of COVID cases quite well.

We have and we haven't. There's been a lot of apathy about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, interventions in Syria and Libya etc which have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands probably millions of people. Millions of children dying of easily preventable diseases. If we dismiss that and say oh well we're not sensitive to deaths of others, only our fellow countrymen that's also not true. Deaths caused tobacco, obesity, alcohol, and drugs cause an entire COVID pandemic of deaths every 9 months or so, ongoing, forever (in the US). Even deaths caused by flu kill one of those 50k wars worth of people every couple of years and people are pretty blase about that. Staggering gun murder rates among black American communities (often times I see these discussed it's dismissed with "oh that's mostly gang related"!!).

So I don't think we're necessarily all that sensitive to death, although we I suppose if it's highly publicized and pushed (like war deaths or non-gang-related murders). We're much more sensitive to fear, which is perception of risk (which obviously includes mortality), but it is also very strongly driven by the amount and tone of news coverage, politicians, social media, etc.

Not to comment on the merits of the response to covid or any of these other issues or whether fear is justified, but the reason why economies were shut down for covid was because of fear not deaths.

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