The true number is the issue, depending on testing policy you will get very different mortality rates.
Here in the Netherlands for instance, it has been made public for a while now that they are not testing many people who are presumed to be infected (but not counted in the official numbers). If the mom is positive and the rest of the family shows symptoms…no tests, but just being told to stay home. I just heard about a couple I know vaguely, that just returned from Northern Italy…and are showing all the main symptoms: no test because they are otherwise healthy and in their thirties.
When this started here a week or so ago, one of the hospitals tested everyone working there that wasn’t feeling well. 300 people, 28 had corona. Some of whom literally felt off for a single day, but were fine after that.
Of course not very reliable for any hard conclusions…but it indicates that you are still more likely to have a common bug, instead of corona…and that many more people might be infected than it seems now. For all I know I have it as well…
To het back on topic: it will take time until we know the real mortality rate.
The difference is the flu has been with us since we believed evil spirits were responsible, and we learned to accept it as part of life from a time where we were helpless to do anything about it. We even hear today, people take their risk with the flu, go without the flu shot, and don’t take measures protect others. Acceptance of the flu is generationally ingrained and people are very resistant to change, and without mass change there is little difference a single person can make. It would also be politically very hard to get people to go along with CoVid19 restrictions for ‘just the flu’, and one really would need international cooperation in such a effort. But if the flu just started today it might be very different then if it was with us since Adam ate the apple. With this said many people know that we could do things better to beat back the flu, but it’s very hard to coordinate.
OTOH Covid 19 has the traits to appear worse the the flu, and we have the momentum going to try to contain it and it is something ‘new’ so we are not accepting that we have to make it part of human life.
They way I’ve been explaining is that when it comes to the flu we know pretty much everything about it. We know how it spreads, we know how to treat it, we have a pretty good idea as to how many people will get it, be hospitalized by it and die from it in a given year and we have vaccines for it. We also know that, like clockwork, it’ll show up around October and disappear around March.
We know all these things for the flu. We don’t know any (or most) of them for this.
Also, my ‘fear’ is that when this all blows over, people are going to running around saying that it was a huge over reaction. We cancelled just about everything and for what? Every time someone calls it an over reaction, I’ve been trying to explain that if this all blows over without amounting to much that they shouldn’t think of this as an over reaction, instead they should consider that it didn’t amount to much because of how we reacted.
Also, maybe we should treat the flu like this. If everyone that had a symptom that could be considered flu like stayed home for X days or until cleared by a doc, maybe we could knock our flu numbers in half and cut a few months off the flu season.
Oh, this is absolutely going to happen. “I never wore a seatbelt as a kid and I never died in a car accident!” We only hear about one side of this story and that’s why the story never goes away.
But the thing is, in this case people are having their literal lives ruined. The opportunity cost of wearing your seat belt in tiny. Shutting down means losing literally everything for some people. So it’s going to be even worse than the seat belt people. It’s going to be “I lost everything because people panicked”. I think we are doing the right thing, but I can imagine feeling different if the small business I’d built was getting destroyed, or if I was looking at not being able to feed my kids or keep a roof over my head.
This is my fear too. Maybe our diligence will manage to prevent the worst outcome, which will unfortunately cause people to think this was all manufactured hysteria. “THE SCIENTISTS SAID THE SKY WAS FALLING AND IT DIDN’T! SCIENTISTS ARE STUPID!” And guess what happens then? The virus gains a foothold this summer and that’s when we see the worst case scenario play out.
Yesterday I was riding down the escalator at work and I overheard people behind me talking about the “hysteria”. IT’S JUST LIKE Y2K, one of them said. I’m not a Y2K expert, but I always thought that all the warnings and preparation helped prevent a disaster from happening. The Y2K disaster didn’t happen, so naturally the uninformed think the hue and cry was all over nothing.
It’s a damn-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation. People kinda suck.
I’ve wondered before if there is a name for this fallacy. The fallacy of, If you don’t prevent it, you’re incompetent - and if you do act to prevent it, and it is prevented, then it was unnecessary.
I tend not to argue with people who say that. Maybe a little back and forth to see where it goes, but if someone doesn’t understand that while they’re correct, the lack of seat belt made no difference, it’s because they never got into a (serious) car accident. Some people can grasp that, many other’s can’t or won’t.
Someone on FB said that yesterday. The person is normally pretty smart and level headed so if may have been a sarcastic comment. In either case, I responded that the reason Y2K didn’t amount to much is because a lot of programmers spent a lot of time writing, testing and pushing out patches to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible.
If we had simply ignored it, the way people want to ignore this, we would have had a lot of problems. Maybe not ‘planes dropping out of the sky’ problems. But a lot more problems than people realized.
You don’t argue against it, you use it as part of the reason that a strong containment and mitigation response has been NECESSARY.
Our healthcare system was nearly swamped by the 2017-18 influenza season. People seem to forget quickly but many hospitals had to have tents set up to take care of patients and created makeshift ICUs. We are still seeing influenza cases now, most recent numbers still higher than last year’s peak.
Anything more intense than peak 2017-18 influenza, either by itself or in combination with influenza, is horrific. We do not know how bad this germ is for sure but IF it is as bad as a moderate flu season and it happens concurrent with even a moderate level of influenza, then we are in disaster zone. There is significant risk that this may, without interventional action like social distancing and such, be worse than, maybe much worse than, 2017-18 influenza all on its own. Even a little worse than that is likely overwhelming.
I do not expect this to be much worse than a moderate level influenza event, but that level alone is reason for GREAT concern, especially occurring as we still have influenza active as well, and the uncertainty that it might be significantly worse justifies dramatic cautionary measures.
Do any regions or nations have effective plans to drastically expand in-patient medical care in an emergency or do the odds of that happening occur so rarely that the resources for that are not allocated.
I always assumed ad hoc treatment centers would be set up in stadiums and other large covered areas in cases of large natural disasters or pandemics, but even so that doesn’t mean they’d have the manpower or equipment to give people the care they need.
Actually, we do. Developing the vaccine was very quick. The delay is in proving that the vaccine’s safe enough. But of course, how safe is “safe enough” depends on how dangerous the disease is that it’s protecting against. If evidence comes out that COVID-19 is much worse than epidemiologists think (i.e., if it’s actually as bad as most non-epidemiologists think it is), then the vaccine will be approved more quickly.
Earlier, you stated that you thought that doing things like Italy’s quarantines were an over-reaction. I am not saying this as a gotcha at all–I have really, really respected and relied on your insights through this whole thing. Has your thinking on that issue changed? If so, what changed it?
It is very likely that there are multiple folks reading this right now who have been infected and feel 100% fine. Assuming I am one of them, we won’t find out that we’re sick until some time next week, on average. There may be hundreds of thousands of us. And there just aren’t enough hospital beds to accommodate the 20% of us who will need them. It’s hard to believe, but we just need to go on and believe it.
I remain thinking that mass quarantine of a region is an inappropriate and disproportionate reaction of little likely benefit above and beyond measures much less draconian, although the opportunity for mitigation and flattening the curve in Italy was a ways back.
Yes a limiting factor is simply healthy trained healthcare providers in a surge circumstance. Among other limiting factors. Here, for example, is one analysis regarding ventilators from 2015.
Not included in the model are numbers of staff out of commission sick themselves or caring for family members either due to illness or school closings.
One thing you can point out is the number of deaths is low because of these extraordinary precautions. China was welding the doors shut to apartment buildings in an attempt to contain it. Countries are setting up drive-thru testing stations. People with positive results are being immediately quarantined. Those are some extreme measures to take. Nothing like that is done to fight the flu. The flu is allowed to flow freely through the population without these kinds of impediments.
Thanks. What about what we are doing now in the US–closing schools, banning gatherings of any size, encouraging people to stay home? There are dreadful costs to these things. Do you think we are over reacting?
“Remember when the ozone hole was gonna explode and it didnt’? HAW HAW HAW” Yeah, because a bunch of eggheads figured out what was going on and advised the lawmakers to make the right laws.
“Remember when the black rhino were going extinct? HAW HAW HAW” Actually, they did go extinct. You’re just too dumb to understand what was lost.