No, I fully understand “flattening the curve.” I’m questioning the utility of it. I thought that was obvious.
From the paper:
It goes on:
The paper does suggest reduction of the death rate by half, maybe, if we do this for 3 months. We still overrun our healthcare system, but yes, we could save many lives. Maybe.
The paper also says we will have rebounding epidemics using the mitigation strategy that will require us to do this again and again.
I don’t see the basis in the paper for determining which patients can survive if and only if they get a ventilator. Do you know if the paper assumed that anyone not getting a bed would die? The paper only shows graphs indicating the overrun of hospital ICU beds.
An economic disaster is not out of the question. It just isn’t. There are already layoffs and it is only going to get worse the longer this goes on.
I’m not arguing spending a couple of weeks at home is a big deal. I’m wondering where we reach a trade off between the damage we are doing to ourselves and our kids is worth the cost we are dumping into this.
What we really should be doing is isolating those most at risk and putting everyone else back to work.
That’s a self-correcting problem. The bigger issue is doing what can be done right now to protect vulnerable members of the population and do what can be done to prevent a glut of cases all at once, which is still going to happen but the more spread out it can be the better off the medical system will be, not only at treating COVID-19 patients but providing care to all of the people with pre-existing issues or who experience other illness or trauma during the epidemic zenith, because the medical personnel and resources going to COVID-19 patients are going to take away from the services everybody else needs, all of the fantasies about mass 3D printing of ventilators aside.
I wondered about that. The anti-vaxxers up until now have had the luxury of using herd immunity for everything. That doesn’t work with this. If a vaccine were available tomorrow, would they be first in line to get it or would they still not want to “risk” autism for their kids? Might not be fair, though, since kids are already immune to this. They would need to immunize the kids so they don’t give it to the grandparents.
Anti-vaxxer parents won’t vaccinate kids, but kids don’t die from this.
Anti-vaxxer grandparents aren’t going to reproduce anymore.
Anti-vaxxer who haven’t reproduced yet aren’t likely to die from this, so they are still going to reproduce and when they do, their kids won’t die from it.
I don’t think this will fix the anti-vaxxer problem.
Latest headline in NYT says nearly 40% of those patients sick enough to be hospitalized are aged 20 - 54. So it’s not just the decrepit elderly being put out of their misery a couple of years early.
Just saw this tweet about 20 and 30 year olds being treated in the ICU. (Note: I don’t know if that’s real or fake news. I’m just reporting what I came across.)
Here is a table showing expected severity by age group for Great Britain and US. I know young people will look at the low fatality rate and shrug their shoulders. But those hospitalization rates aren’t small potatoes when you’re talking about millions of people.
Given the options available, that might just be the best choice. I’m not just blindly saying, “Won’t someone think of grandma!!!” like everyone else.
This situation sucks. Lots of people are going to die. You need to learn to accept that and realize there is NOTHING you or anyone else can do to prevent that. What we need now is to use calm, rational thought to balance one horrible outcome against another.
We can save lives, but at what cost and for how long. Despite Stranger’s assertions, these are most certainly extreme measures to be going through. And extreme costs. Nearly a trillion dollars just in direct government payout, which doesn’t include lost wages, healthcare, etc., being spent to save perhaps a million lives for a brief period. And that is only on the first pass.
Do NOT mis-characterize my position as saying we should just do nothing and let nature sort it out. I’m not.
It’s not about changing your habits to avoid getting infected.
It’s about assuming you are infected and changing your habits to avoid spreading it.
Even if people aren’t especially fussed about themselves, most people are sufficiently protective of their closest loved one to act in THEIR best interest, with an ABUNDANCE of caution.
There is no way to “isolat[e] those most at risk”; while the elderly (those in the 65 years and up category) are having significantly higher incidences of serious COVID-19 response, it is also occurring at significant numbers in the under 65 population, too. And those numbers are skewed because while the incidence requiring treatment in older populations varies from 4-8% depending on age, that is only ~16% of the US population, while ~65% is between 15 and 64 years of age, so that 1-2% incidence in the younger population actually corresponds to a comparable number of patients, all of whom are in their productive years (for those willing to discount the elderly simply because they only have a couple decades of non-producing life still within them).
You’ve clearly decided to believe regardless of facts or informed opinion, which is your privilege. And we’ll certainly see how that “Send ‘em back to work” strategy works, because that is what China is doing now for the exact reasons you advocate, and the wide opinion among epidemiologists is that because of asymptomatic transmission they will experience another epidemic wave that will dwarf this one. But the “lets roll the dice and let the gods sort it out” approach is not based upon any kind of informed opinion and will assuredly kill far more people, both directly and incidentally due to overstress of the medical system, while the anxiety that we’ll experience a decades-long depression is purely based upon speculation and fear.
Sure it does, but you are eventually going to have to come into contact with the general public (even professional hermits like me have to go to the Post Office and the DMV once in a while) and having a population that has withstood the virus and in which it is no longer endemic is important to the vulnerable members of the population (which, again, are not just the elderly). Having the distribution of infection more spread out is not only better for attempting not to overload the health services, but also ensuring that the potential reservoirs are few and far between, and that there is time for effective treatments to be developed and practiced. One of the problems with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) was that it burned out so quick with only limited outbreaks that companies pretty much stopped developing treatments even though the virus responsible for it (MERS-CoV) is endemic in the dromedary camels that in regular human contact as working and food animals.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a long term problem that will likely be around in the virome for the foreseeable future, and it may well mutate and change up, causing fresh epidemics and reinfection. Short term thinking or just dismissing it as a one-time event where we just write off a couple percent of the population as the cost of doing business is just not informed and astute thinking. Including the debt service, we’ve paid more than US$8,000,000,000,000 on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars which produced nothing but squandering every bit of good will the United States developed since WWII, and somehow our economy kept running apace.
I think it is highly unlikely that there is NOTHING we can do to keep ANYONE from dying.
Time is our ally. You let the disease run rampant, and yes more people will die. People that are uncared for that could have made it due to lack of equipment, lack of facilities, lack of health care personnel because they are sick too now because you are letting the disease run rampant.
What can you do with time? You can build more medical equipment. You can get more tests. You can use some of the unemployed temporarily to help with the crisis. You can get people planning on methods that CAN get people back to work, through proper quarantining and testing. But we don’t have that yet. And we WON’T have that if you just allow for some mass catastrophe because you’re impatient to end things fast.
Things may never get back to normal EVEN IF THEY END FAST.
According to this poll, the number of Americans who are basically rolling their eyes at the social distancing recommendations is large, and increasing rapidly. :smack: I guess we’ll see how long that attitude lasts–problem being that by the time things get bad enough to change their minds, it will be largely too late.
Preach!
We’re just learning in the past few days that this spreads in aerosol form. So how can you be so sure wearing a mask doesn’t have the slightest prophylactic effect? Don’t they really just say that to avoid a run on masks that might make them scarce for healthcare providers?
You actually answered your own question. The reality is that in fact we cannot let up on these measures until we have a vaccine. “A couple months” is a pipe dream.
I think it’s most likely that ‘you can make a reasonable argument’ masks don’t help much, IOW it’s not clearly misleading the public to say so. But the fact that there aren’t enough high quality masks and first responders and medical people need them more, probably enters into the messaging on masks IMO.
And anti-viral treatments, some hopeful early signs there including with existing drugs. But I don’t think anybody knows how long you’d have to sustain what level of measures in a relatively good outcome. Anyway a lot of potential big positives (like on the drug front) could appear if you slow down spread, though you just cannot know how good and when as of now. If you speed it up, not, and I also agree there’s no way it would ‘burn out’ in 6-8 weeks. For another thing as it got really bad, panic would paralyze the economy anyway.
As others have said at more length, the economy and tiding it over with liquidity and stimulus programs is a relatively known quantity. I believe the people heavily emphasizing the ‘destruction of the economy’ are overestimating the fallout and risk there (though it’s obviously serious, the size of the stock market drop tells you that if you believe the market is remotely close to efficient), and grossly understating the risks of accepting a ‘natural’ spike in the disease. And again it isn’t just ‘flattening the curve’ to the same number of cases over a longer period (which can be treated more easily). Much better things than that could happen if it’s slowed down enough, though are not guaranteed.
You make a few assumptions. Firstly, you assume a virus can or is even possible to make. We dont know how the virus mutates. If people can be reinfected then a virus might be useless.
Been working from home since last week and to be honest it made me more relaxed compared when I am commuting to the office. Thanks to the internet I can still video chat with my friends! It is just little scary like what would happen few months from now would the cases really decrease??? hoping it would.
I said there is nothing you can do to prevent a lot people from dying. This, in the best case scenario, is going to kill hundreds of thousands of people. As has been pointed out many, many times, we aren’t in a battle to keep people from being exposed, we are in a battle to meter the number of people exposed so we can hope to save as many as possible. That that will die as a result of exposure to this and are going to be beyond any medical help presently available, are still going to die. That is what flattening the curve is all about. People in large numbers are still going to die. The only goal with social distancing is to help those that might be helped by medical intervention to make sure they continue to have access to medical intervention. If we just let this run rampant they won’t have that, thus we need to meter those infected so we can keep providing medical attention to those that need it.
I have no delusion that our present leadership will utilize this time effective or efficiently. We might buy a few months, maybe, but in those few months we could actually be effectively inoculating huge swaths of our population by allowing those at the lowest risk to get exposed and, therefore, immune. It has the double benefit of keeping society functioning and allowing a broad spectrum, a majority, to become immune. They are no longer vectors for this, they are in and out of the hospital quickly, and will alleviate pressure on the medical system for when this does hit those most vulnerable.
I’m not impatient to end things fast. But by delaying this so that everyone gets this around the same time is not going to do any good. It has the added benefit of trashing the economy along with the delay. If we were perfect in our social distancing all we are doing is putting off the inevitable for another 6 to 8 weeks. It makes no sense to do that. None. A vaccine is at least a year away. 3 months won’t buy is much of anything except a wrecked economy and nearly as many dead.
