It’s a made up number, but I was making it up for the world, not the US. However, at least one set of projections I saw for Texas suggested we’d have over 400,000 deaths if we practiced mere “social distancing”. Even if 50% of those were “non-productive”, that’s 200,000 people out of the workforce. We are talking about as many deaths just in Texas as all of the US suffered during WW2. You can’t handwave away the economic impact of losing that many people–both the loss of productive capacity and the loss of demand.
This country spends whatever it takes, no holds barred, on national security. Is this virus not a national security threat?
This is comparable to WWII in some ways. They had rationing, restrictions, and industries switching from consumer goods to war manufacturing.
The country survived that and came out of it stronger than before.
Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King’s College London, debunks the argument about choosing between the economy and the lockdown.
This is a good, clear, common-sense article:
Don’t believe the myth that we must sacrifice lives to save the economy
Here’s a thought experiment: a bag of 100 M&Ms. 4 of them will kill you. Eat one. I have a gun to your head: EAT ONE! But wait! I have a second bag of 100 M&Ms. only one of those will kill you. You still have to pick one and eat it, but what is it worth to you to switch bags?
A utilitarian.
I am middle aged with several comorbidities and no children. If I caught the virus and needed a ventilator, but there was another patient of the same age who had children and no comorbidities, I would expect doctors to triage and prioritize the other patient. The other patient has a higher survival rate and children, so they should get priority. Its called triage and its happening all over due to the virus.
Resources are finite. As another example, when I am elderly if I am looking at going to a nursing home and blowing through my life savings to sit in a bed for a year then die, or die early and leave an inheritance to nieces and nephews, I pick the latter option.
Not really. Need for hospital care and need for ICU care among hospitalized patients follows the same pattern as death rate, so while an overwhelmed or primitive health system would show significantly increased deaths in all age groups, the pattern of much higher mortality in the elderly and much lower in younger groups would remain unchanged.
Part of the problem is that yes, everyone will know people who died of the virus… but the people who have died and will continue to die from the overreaction aren’t nearly as visible.
And a lot of other folks who die from the overreaction will be misattributed as being due to the virus. Like, those overstrained medical services: A lot of that strain is due to people panicking. Most people will develop some sort of respiratory disease over the course of a winter, but most of those diseases aren’t cornonavirus. And even of those who do get genuine coronavirus, most will need no medical care at all. But in an environment of panic, people who don’t need medical care at all will rush to the ER, and buy up masks and sanitizer that they’re not using properly but that the hospitals actually need, and do other counterproductive things.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t react at all. But if what we were doing was the right amount of reaction, why wasn’t the CDC recommending it? Could it be because they’ve spent decades studying problems like this in extensive detail, and determined that it would do more harm than good?
But having a million or more members of the workforce, and another million “old people” die is NOT good for the whole, it’s NOT just a series of personal tragedies.
Yes, this is exactly right. Just look at the case in Italy. They got hit earlier and harder than most other places, before we realized exactly how serious this thing could be, and they got overwhelmed. Their death rate is closer to 10%, not the world average of 4%, the hoped-for 2%, or the optimistic 0.5%*.
The faster the cases arrive, the higher the death toll will be, even if in the end, the number of people infected is virtually the same. This is the whole point of the “Flatten the curve” movement.
*And we need to keep pointing out that, yes, even under the most optimistic assumptions that get the rate down to 0.5%, that’s still 5-10 times more deadly than typical influenza. So all those people trying to brush this off as “just another flu” are still being complete idiots, under our best possible assumptions.
I was willing to let the comment pass in the OP, but since he’s said it a second time, I have to take issue with it.
In the ten years since I retired, I’ve (with my wife):
-Worked on the 2010 Census effort
-Worked the entire ten years delivering Meals on Wheels
-Developed and implemented a backpack weekend lunch program for at-risk elementary school children in our neighborhood (at our expense)
-Volunteered at a Restore in our city (Habitat for Humanity, for the unfamiliar)
-Supported many charities locally and nationally
-Recently volunteered to work on a Habitat build in New Mexico. Regrettably, these projects have been cancelled for now, but we hope to be able to reengage when this is all over.
-Donated untold amounts of clothing to homeless shelters, and a large amount of items to Goodwill.
I would ask Wesley Clark to enlighten me as to what he considers “productive”, and also as to what he himself has done for humanity in the last ten years.
How about when the problem becomes four middle aged men who need the same ventilator? This disease could easily triple the number of hospitalizations required this year.
How are you going to let those 25 million people die? Do we all agree that if someone is dying of coronavirus we just put them in a room somewhere to choke on their own mucus so we don’t have to watch?
In order for this not to be an overreaction we all need to agree that the health care system is just not going to try to save these people. If it does try, it will get overwhelmed. Is that a decision you’re willing to make?
I’m curious about the rates in each age groups that tend to require ICU care, but survive because of it. Right now we are focussed on the fraction in each age group that die despite best care. But once the system saturates the death will start to come from the former group as well. In a worst case scenario they will dominate.
Yes, the relative rates stay much the same as the system overloads, but in all age groups it gets worse, potentially quite a bit worse. Eventually, as the system saturates and goes into massive overload one may find that the death rate for the very elderly stabilises - at close to 100%. Then the relative death rates will start to close. :eek:
I would be interesting to know how many people in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s who are diagnosed avoid hospitalisation, and how many of those need intensive care. It the country has 100,000 ICU/ventilator beds and staff capable of driving them, and it sees 1,000,000 people with need for that care, 900,000 people die. The relative death rates between the age groups collapses because people in the older age groups can only die once.
Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic.
Everybody says that when they are middle-aged. Yet the number of people who do that when they are very old is vanishingly small.
Why do you think that is?
I’ve posted this vox article elsewhere:
It’s not complete but it does discuss available stats on the % who require hospitalization and ICU by age.
Page 5 of the famous report which made the UK reverse their herd immunity strategy has estimates for all of those numbers.
Incidentally it seems to me that it’s the sick elderly who are least affected by a collapse of the health care infrastructure, because once they require mechanical ventilation they have a 60-80% mortality rate in any case.
I think the single most important line from that page is this:
Prior to social distancing, the number of cases was doubling about every 4 days. If, even in the best of circumstances, it takes 8 days of hospital care for people to recover, it becomes pretty obvious that we’re going to lose this race. 16 days is right out.
This isn’t the hard math guys, it’s right there.
In the best of circumstances, which is the large majority of circumstances in every age group according the report, it takes 0 days of hospital care for people to recover.
More importantly, 8 days of hospital care is not 8 days of ICU care. Perhaps we should be focusing on construction and staffing of huge field hospitals where patients can receive basic treatment such as supplemental oxygen and medication, as opposed to ICU beds and ventilators which are much lower yield.
The part you’re missing is that if the medical system becomes completely overwhelmed, it won’t be a choice between you and another patient the same age with kids and no comorbidities. You’ll already be dead; instead, it will be a choice among five or six adults in their 40s and 50s, all of whom have kids and responsibilities and an excellent chance of survival IF they are the one picked to get the ventilator, but most of whom will be “triaged away” and die simply because six people and one ventilator is crappy math. (Meanwhile, your twenty-something nephew in otherwise superb health shows up with appendicitis, and the hospital has to say "sorry, we don’t have anybody to look at you. If you’re still alive, come back next month.)
Also, Jesus, how do we make those calls? I know some teachers that are literally saving the lives and futures of their students but have no children of their own, and I know parents who beat the shit out of their kids even after we call the cops about it. Who can say who deserves to live and who decides to die?