A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

Great Debates
21

This is an article I got about the spread and rates and how China differs from Iran and San Francisco.

I can’t say it made me feel better.

22

From the article that vislor posted:
Quote:
This is what you can conclude:

[ul]
[li]Countries that are prepared will see a fatality rate of ~0.5% (South Korea) to 0.9% (rest of China).[/li][li]Countries that are overwhelmed will have a fatality rate between ~3%-5%[/li][/ul]
Put in another way: Countries that act fast can reduce the number of deaths by ten. And that’s just counting the fatality rate. Acting fast also drastically reduces the cases, making this even more of a no-brainer.Countries that act fast reduce the number of deaths at least by 10x.

There is also this twitter thread about events on the ground in Italy:
Quote:
The current situation is difficult to imagine and numbers do not explain things at all. Our hospitals are overwhelmed by Covid-19, they are running 200% capacity

Quote:
 	 		 			 				Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even  assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and  no ITU staff attends when they arrest.

The most useful suggestion comes in that thread: it makes sense to self-isolate now and not to wait for the government to act.

23

Apologies for the weird formatting in my last post. When I try to edit the post, it disappears. When I recreate it and post it, the formatting is screwy. Rinse and repeat.

24

I thought that was Lyndon Johnson. :smiley:

25

Even if only 2% are dead, I’ll be one of those 2%. A tragedy for me at least.

26

If we’re being honest, killing off the elderly and the diseased would save money long term on welfare, social security and health care costs.

Also hopefully (but unlikely) since consumer demand has collapsed maybe we will get legislation to increase consumer demand. Laws that make jobs more stable, wages higher, etc. so people have money to spend.

27

Since it was his specific audience who got the early news it was all a hoax, one would imagine the people least fearful and most likely to ignore preventative transmission advice would be his base. Also assuming his base is an older crowd (the Fox News audience), I’m guessing COVID-19 is going to have quite a say on the size of his support.

This may be the one instance where Trump can’t talk his way out of his lies. The virus will serve as a pretty good fact checker.