As I understand it if we let the virus set the pace of new infections we get a tall but narrow bell curve representing the rate of new infections. The economy would be only slightly affected and we would achieve herd immunity pretty quick. The downside of course is that mostly older people like me have a good chance of not having medical care available to them due to lack of available resources. That must be a hard thing for the rest of you to swallow.
Now I know the seasonal flu kills 10’s of thousands of people each year without any economic interruption. Obviously our medical capacity is geared for it.
But if we flatten the rate of new infections , I’ll still be in danger (with proper treatment available) but for a much longer period of time, perhaps for a few more years I hear.
The benefit is the number of lives that would have been lost due to lack of care.
The cost per life saved would blow our minds I’m guessing
So this is a long about way of saying to the younger generations that are out of work right now and on the front lines of this crisis, thankyou on behalf of all of us vulnerable
and elderly
However, your “tall bell curve” needs some numbers along the y-axis.
From what I can figure, the numbers of infected people are so great, they go beyond the old and decrepit. You’d have a mighty number of middle-aged and youth who will be very sick.
Medical care, which includes equipment, space, and trained personnel, is finite. As the number of infected rise, doctors and nurses will have to choose who gets unplugged, so the ventilator can be set up for a sicker patient. As more and more people present themselves for treatment, the selection process becomes almost arbitrary. People will offer to pay for ventilators. Fights will ensue.
The medical personnel will be dropping like flies. Fatigue and stress will make them vulnerable. Personal Protection Equipment is scarce NOW. Soon, a scary number of infected will be the very people we depend on to help us get well.
Flattening the bell curve will hopefully allow the number of respirators and hospital beds will be enough to accommodate most patients.
Look at Italy. They are attempting to share respirators between two patients, to stretch the resources. Yet each day seems to have a greater death toll. Cemeteries are full, coffins are unavailable. At night, under the cover of darkness, the military conducts a convoy of trucks loaded with dead bodies, to the crematoria.
And that just counts the people who actually have COVID-19. Imagine trying to get an appendectomy, or deliver a baby with complications, or be treated for critical injuries in a car accident or a fire when all the hospitals are overfull and medical staff are overwhelmed or sick
Remember “Gone With the Wind?” The wounded, the dying, and the dead lay in row after row after row near the train station in Atlanta. And Scarlett expected the doctor to drop everything and deliver her baby.
~VOW
Agreed. I’m just making the point that even a person with magic immunity to Covid19 will still be at risk from the effects of Covid 19 on the medical system.
Everyone will suffer from lack of medical resources. Car accident victims. Hunting accident victims. Cancer patients. People suffering from severe allergies and food poisonings. Babies, toddlers, teens, middle-age people.
Dallas just went on lock-down. The data they were using suggested that with “social distancing” there would be over 400k deaths–not cases, deaths–in Texas alone. I don’t know what data they are looking at, but 400k deaths is not an acceptable number. It would shit can the economy all by itself, so we are basically looking at the economy as a sunk cost. It will meltdown. What’s the best path to be in a place to rebuild it?
In my mind, with 3 months of lockdown, we are like America in the great depression, or in the midst of WW2, when everything we produced went overseas. With millions dead, we are more like the UK after WW2: our actual productive capacity is upended. It took their economy a lot longer to recover than ours.
I think you’ve got it wrong with the “the economy would only be slightly affected”. People can’t seem to look beyond the still fluctuating mortality rate to the much larger rate of “requires intensive care over several weeks” and the even larger “would be too sick to go to work”.
If you look to Italy and see that backlog of funerals that’s building up, you would get something similar, with the direct and the psychological effect that would have. Yes, not having a lockdown would mean more people would be available to do the burying, but it would also mean more people dead faster.
And then there’s the aftereffects of being so sick you need weeks in the ICU. Likely a large portion of those will have permanently reduced lung capacity.
This is not about avoiding deaths among the weak and elderly. Those have the highest mortality rates, but the rates for other groups are still significant. The rates of cases requiring intensive care for all groups are definitely significant.
And we can add the psychological effect on health care workers living through a period of refusing life saving treatment to suffering and dying patients.
A number of reasonable people have made that argument. The extreme economic cost of an economic shut down must be weighed against both moral and economic cost of possibly millions of people dying in the U.S.
That same study showed that even moderate mitigation might still entail 1 million U.S. fatalities. Even if that was reduced to 500,000, the question is whether the extreme economic cost is a worthwhile societal tradeoff – especially if it later appears the shutdown must be maintained for many months to achieve that.
There is another option which is being discussed, which is segregate people by age, and keep those 60+ years old under shelter in place, and let younger people go back to work. But even younger people have morbidity and mortality risk.
A variant of this is wait until serology tests are available, detecting those who have successfully recovered, then send those people back to work since they are possibly immune for at least a year.
The current PCR tests can only detect if a person actively has COVID-19, not after they recovered from it. Serology testing when available would likely be cheaper, faster and more amenable to mass automation. These are already being trialed in certain places and might be available within a few months.
Plus: who cares for the elderly? Younger people. Multigenerational homes like ours would have one or more younger people coming and going and bringing the virus home to infect the elderly.
So even ignoring the direct risk to the younger people, this is not a perfect answer.
The Fed allowing for unlimited stimulus got me thinking about this again. At this point the federal government is probably going to spend 2-3 trillion dollars to prevent 1 million deaths which is about 2.5 million per life and well below the VFL from the EPA and DOT at around 9 million. Thinking about 8-12 trillion being spent and lost over the next 18 months freaks me out but that may be what we’re looking at and it still being ‘worth it’.
Aside from the other points made around preserving some of the medical capacity by flattening the curve, playing for time gives us a chance to a) learn more about how the coronovirus spreads, b) build up testing capacity - including rapid testing capacity - so that we can isolate only people who are actually infected, and c) potentially develop treatments and vaccines.
Its astounding to me how callously people can just dismiss this as “well, tens or hundreds of thousands will die, but at least our economy will be slightly better off if we do nothing”. First of all, you’re wrong – hundreds of thousands dead, even if they’re all old and retired, would wreck our economy. Second of all, even if you were right, that’s fucked up. How’d you feel if the rest of society decided you weren’t worth protecting?
Specifically, the last line.
R0=2.2, trigger is 3000 (cumulative ICU cases). It says that if we implement home isolation (CI), household quarantine (HQ), and social distancing of those over 60 (SDOL70), we can reduce reduce peak ICU bed demand by 49%.
It also shows that if we do that same 3 things, but additionally close schools and universities (PC), we will reduce peak bed demand by 24%.
Does this mean we will actually INCREASE peak bed demand by keeping students at home? Does that imply these students will spread the disease a lot more by being home?
The table also indicates that if we trigger on peak beds instead of deaths, adding PC will decrease peak bed demand, which is what I would expect.
Why would triggering on deaths rather than beds be worse?
Right? The moment the talking heads starting pissing and moaning about the economy, I decided our economic model sucks and we need one that is actually robust. Very fucked up all the people who saw the same news and decided human lives aren’t actually that valuable at all.
Honestly, I’d be okay with it. I’d understand the circumstances. Some other people have said even that they’d be willing to sacrifice themselves than wrecking society so severely and creating such a dystopian future for the young ahead of us.
Because a wrecked economy also bring massive suffering and to critical groups of people as well. On top of that the social and mental health effects, again on developing children and people, would also be devastating and leave decades long impact.
That doesn’t mean I’m not sympathetic to the people dying. I’ve wavered back and forth on this, and either way I feel terrible.
There are the aftereffects of spending trillions now that might end up costing more lives later. If we could spend $4 trillion now to save 1,000,000 lives, maybe that makes sense. But spending $4 trillion now might mean millions of lives lost over the next 10 years that would otherwise be saved. People will lose their jobs, their homes and their health insurance. That money could have gone into research to treat other diseases, education or housing for those who run into difficult times. That $4 trillion has to come from somewhere.