One thing I will mention again is that large swaths of the economy aren’t shut down and can’t be shut down.
Health care and everything related to health care, including the factories that make medical supplies and the warehouse operations that sell them. Anything related to food that isn’t a sit down restaurant. Farms, factories distributors. Gas stations and fuel distribution. Companies that make packaging and shipping materials for essential industries. Someone still has to print and label all the food packaging.
The construction industry, to some extent - although they may have been partially shut down in areas under mandatory lockdown. But you have to let enough plumbers and electricians stick around for repair work and make enough supplies for repairs. Law enforcement, first responders and the industries that supply them.
The areas of the economy that have shut down are the most visible, but much industry is still up and running. And if those workers get sick en masse, we are all screwed.
That’s why those of us in those highly visible non-essential businesses need to stay home as much as possible, we need to keep the essential workers healthy.
That’s now. Or a couple weeks ago. I’m talking about the entirety of the pandemic. Millions dead in a few months or a year, even if they’re all “old and unproductive” is devastating to an economy. And that’s before you account for how significantly the survivors will alter their consumption and work patterns.
But if you have already been infected, recovered, and now know for sure that you have immunity,then you will go to a restaurant. And keep the economy functioning.
I’m not saying that we should do this today–because we still have a chance to control the virus.We can still count the number of cases accurately, and we know precisely how many deaths.
But in just a few more weeks, there’s a good chance that we will learn that we failed to control it. The infected will no longer be countable ( millions, not thousands), and even the numbers of dead bodies will be only approximate estimates (tens of thousands).
At that point, yes, it will make sense economically to end the shutdown and let the disease run full speed, till herd immunity builds up in the population.
Then go back to normal and rebuild, like the Marshall plan after WWII.
And millions of unemployed is also devastating.
So we are playing a numbers game, in which nobody knows what the numbers will be.
Some hard questions are going to be answered withing the next 3-4 weeks.
In effect its a decision by children to sacrifice their own (and everyone else’s) parents for their own long-term benefit either in some notional societal good or specifically to release assets and their value for their own use.
I’m sure their own children will be seeing the worthiness of the measure and wondering how quickly they can euthenize their own unproductive older generation in turn.
As I mentioned in another thread, for all of Trump’s blustering about wanting to open the country back up, it’s not like he or anybody else can just flip a switch and have everything go back to normal.
Disney World isn’t going to open back up just because Trump says everything is fine. Schools aren’t going to let students back in. I doubt many people are making vacation plans for the near future.
The best anyone can hope for is to contain the damage that’s already been done.
No, they are definitely not thinking with their head on straight. ALL the 'let ‘er rip’ arguments depend upon assumptions that have no evidentiary support:
***“Only old people die of this” (as mentioned in your post). Already disproved by numerous cases of young, previously-healthy people dying.
**“COVID-19 is just like the flu.” In fact, what it’s like is double pneumonia for which there is no treatment. Many patients need to be on a ventilator—receiving round-the-clock care from a number of health professionals—for 20 to 30 days, before their immune systems kick in. Before this virus, 3 to 4 days on a ventilator was the norm.
***“Once you get it you’re immune.” This is the biggest and least-supported assumption. Several indications cast doubt on this unfounded assumption; to name one: the idea of using plasma from people who appear to have recovered is limited by the fact that the antibodies in their blood are effective for only a limited time. As the New York Times pointed out:
Again: there is no lifelong immunity to the common cold, is there? None whatsoever. And the novel coronavirus may well turn out to behave the same way. We have no evidence-based reason to believe otherwise.
Those who are arguing for ‘infect everyone and get it over with’ are ignoring important facts. For common topics of dispute on message boards, that lack of rational, evidence-based reasoning doesn’t matter a great deal.
But for the topic of ‘let’s all get infected at once,’ the stupid will have deadly consequences—for many more than just the person making the bad argument.
All I can think about regarding the OP’s question is: are we ready and willing to do mass graves? It’s not like funeral people are exempt from catching this virus. Hospital morgues will fill fast and so will temp. freezer trucks. No one knows AFAIK how long a dead body is infectious and/or if chilling them down to stop the rotting will render them safe.
Grisly thoughts but I read a lot of pandemic/zombie/all kinds of apocalypse stories.
Funeral services have already been banned or severely restricted in many places. I have lost all of my immediate family but I still have close family members and friends. I can’t imagine not being able to grieve in the manner to which I have been accustomed. It’s already mind boggling.
Yeah, after everyone is either dead or recovered we can open things up again. But that is not going to happen by Easter. And definitely when we have a vaccine we can open things up.
Most of the estimates I’ve seen show the same area under both curves. If we flatten it, we can open up when we reach the end of the flattened curve. Which is longer from now then the tail of the nonflattened curve - but with a lot fewer deaths.
Any chance to discuss this point without being shouted at? I’ll try.
I think most who are discussing the “let er rip” strategy aren’t suggesting you would develop lifelong immunity, which seems to be what you claim the argument is. I would hope not, at least. I’m not in the “let er rip” category, but I am in the category of strategically exposing people (not Trump’s plan, I promise) and my understanding is that people who survive this will have immunity for at least a short while, perhaps years. There is evidence of that.
Short-term immunity can be used as a foundation for resumption of economic activity ONLY if reliable testing is freely available—because no one will know when their short-term immunity will expire. A year? Three months? The difference is crucial.
We need lots of tests, and we need them to be free (obviously–people can’t be shelling out thousands, repeatedly), and most of all, we need them to be fast-and-reliable. A society dealing with virulently contagious + dangerous viral outbreaks* can carry on economic activity: you need buildings constructed with ‘airlocks’ and plenty of qualified, trained people to administer tests. You pass the test, you go inside and work. You don’t, you go home. (Variations on this plan can be developed for all those who work somewhere other than inside a building, too; they will be more complex.)
But all of this is pie in the sky at the moment. We don’t have the fast, reliable, plentiful tests. We don’t have the trained personnel, nor the protective equipment they’d need. We don’t have a system set up to fund all this, and it won’t work if the financial burden is placed on the workers.
I realize that people need to be able to at least picture a resumption of “normal life.” There is a way that can happen, but it’s a long way off.
*And this particular novel coronavirus is highly unlikely to be the last challenge humanity faces. Even if no one on the planet ever again operates a market in which live animals and humans mingle, there are going to be more nasty microbes evolving and attacking us.
Yes, three months is a lot different than a year. I don’t disagree.
You wrote a nice post that argues against some of the rationale people are putting forward for “let er rip.” I think you overstated what some of the arguments are, but the immunity one was particularly sensitive to me because I think it grossly mischaracterizes that particularly rationale.
I think we need to try to discuss this honestly and not grossly exaggerate what is being argued or discussed. If we do that, maybe we can come to an agreement on a best path forward.
The rest… I’ll leave to discuss later. Suffice it to say, please take care when characterizing counter arguments.
I am sure that complete “let er rip” proponents exist somewhere, but I’ve not seen any in the wild. Not even Trump.
OTOH I see quite a bit of reasoned discussion that considers a range of social distancing options between near shut down of society (barring activities defined as “essential”) and doing nothing.
Let’s address the shouted claims about assumptions with no evidentiary support.
No one is claiming that only old people die of this. Those over 70 in particular and/or with chronic health problems are at much greater risk per individual. In Italy, for example, over 85% of the deaths have been among those 70 and over. What is the true infection mortality rate among non-elderly without major comorbidities? No one really knows as identified case is clearly an underestimate of the true infection rate. One estimate is that 85% of all infections have been undocumented and uncounted. If so, then the age specific crude case fatality rates used by the Imperial College study are minimally 85% over-estimates. Still large n will be a real and a significant number in an absolute sense - whenever they get it.
Lifelong immunity is not required. We do not yet know how long immunity having had COVID-19 will last. As noted common cold coronaviruses tend to last in the one to three year range (although re-infection tends to be milder disease). But immunity to SARS seems to last 8 to 10 years. There is some confidence that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 will last a minimum of one to two years, and possibly much longer. By one to two years a vaccine would be more likely available. It is also true that it won’t just suddenly disappear for all, all at once. Even as it fades there would be a population more fully protected which would slow a new epidemic’s surge.
Given that we blew the chance to apply the same approach as in South Korea and in Singapore (neither of which required the level of society shut down we are now doing) what are the graded options between let er rip “infect everyone”, and suppression level measures for the likely 18 months that it would take to develop a vaccine and prove its safety/efficacy?
At some point we will see solid evidence of flattening the curve - most lagging a decrease in daily death rates within a region, less lagging a decrease in ICU admissions attributable to COVID-19. Hopefully the first signs within two weeks. What then?
Rationally those who are immune come out first (however many that is and it could in certain regions be a large number, we don’t yet know), and those at lowest risk for getting sickest second, so on. Monitor rates of new disease (at that point having enough test kits) and ICU admissions attributable to COVID-19 and if rates stay below some predetermined threshold release the next lowest risk cohort into the workforce, rinse repeat, aiming to have it spread out over as long as five to six months, but done before influenza hits. There are interventions that likely have the lowest ROI (in long term total morbidity and mortality balance each side) and ones that have the highest. Undo the first group and if we stay within the threshold for a couple of weeks consider the timing of releasing the next. Along the way build more capacity and collect the missing key data inputs.
But not impossible. I have a tab open in Chrome showing the worldometer pandemic counters. When it refreshed at 00:16 the death toll declined to 27,250 from the 27,251 at 23:51 GMT. One lucky guy.
I’d have thought it obvious that my post did not attempt to claim that all cases of COVID-19 resemble double-pneumonia, nor that anything short of life-long immunity rendered economic recovery impossible, nor that Let 'er Rip advocates claimed that only old people would die.
For most readers, I’d guess, it was clear that I was responding to “get it over with” arguments such as the one we have in this thread’s opening post:
Implicit or actually explicit, here and in other 'let ‘er rip’ arguments, is that most people will “get over” COVID-19, and that the process of getting over it might cause some expense in terms of “temporary hospitals,” but that’s about it. No particular stress on healthcare professionals; no particularly long stays in intensive care—just the need to buy a few more ventilators, really.
To counter such views it seemed reasonable to point out that for many people around the globe so far, COVID-19 has been a lot more like double-pneumonia than the rosy picture in the OP assumes. That’s not the same thing as saying that COVID-19 is like double pneumonia for everyone who is infected. Again, I’d have thought that would go without saying (and I suspect it did, for most readers).
The OP didn’t discuss immunity, but of course many arguing the “let’s get it over with” case do:
The writer does go on to note issues with the argument. But unsupported assumptions—here, that commerce and GDP would “continue to thrive”—abound.
And “herd immunity” itself is a precarious concept when it comes to a virus that may mutate in unpredictable ways. From the marginalrevolution page:
and
My point (in the original post) was that “let ‘er’ rip” arguments depend upon completely unwarranted assumptions about immunity. It did not deny the potential utility of limited-time immunity.
Hanson was previously known for his advocacy of free sex for incels.
*Unless you are going for some definition of “complete” which requires arguments to have no qualifications whatsoever, which would be rather shameless of you.
If you want to carp about “only” you distort the 'let 'er ‘rip’ argument. The point is that virtually all people making that argument, claim that one of its virtues is that most of those who die will be useless old burdens on society—even though most of them avoid being quite that candid. But the message is clear. Here’s a typical example (it’s from the marginalrevolution page linked above).
In other words, ‘They’re Going To Die, Anyway!’ is a crucial part of the argument. My post pointed this out. It did not claim that every advocate of 'let ‘er rip’ had stated that “only” old people would die.
You’re going to need to add a massive apparatus for re-training to that program. If, say, an automotive fuel-filter factory had a workforce of 68 and that was the minimum for effective operation, but only 14 of those employees qualified to be in a “released” cohort, then you’re going to have to train 54 other newly-“released” people, who had been doing some other kind of work before, to do the fuel-filter-factory jobs.
Multiply this throughout the economy and you have a major need for re-education and training. Not all jobs are skilled, of course. But enough are, to be an important factor.
The search is on! Whomever is found to have resurrected will doubtless be drained of plasma for the good of mankind. Same with all those listed as “recovered”. Antibodies! Immunity! I’d hate to be one.
