No. Newt Gingrich, as always, can go fuck himself.
I did, however, think you might find him persuasive.
One non-hypothetical: People are social animals. Social distancing can only last a couple weeks before cabin fever will out. Click to see an Ikea in Singapore today:
Early contact tracing with forced quarantine for those positive seems to be working pretty well in flattening the curve in Singapore. But measures like trying to keep children isolated IMHO displays a lack of common sense. In two weeks they’ll be crawling over each other at the playgrounds.
Trying to isolate different countries, which may have not-radically-different infection rates, from each other, also makes no sense to me.
Delaying infections by two weeks is a HUGE improvement over what we have now.
I would rather act with an abundance of caution and flatten the curve while we can than to be too late to act and have a catastrophe like Italy on our hands. YMMV.
They can afford to relax a bit in Singapore because they clamped on air travel early, tested maniacally (by this time many of the ones in that article are aware that they have no symptoms or tested negative) and thanks to a government-run universal healthcare system with a significant private healthcare sector they had the capability to do so.
We are not testing much yet, and we were very late in the response in the USA, thanks to the delays in testing and generally dealing with unknown rates of contagion, the efforts to limit contagion by advising about or closing public venues makes sense… until we get more testing and access to care.
Looking at the CDC site right now, they have 5833 deaths and 73968 recovered. With SARS-Cov-2, once you get sick, you seem to stay sick for weeks. People often start OK but get worse. To me, it seems to make the most sense to look at the “resolved” cases and that shows a mortality of 7%.
That’s misleading because it doesn’t include people who had no symptoms or mild symptoms. They were never tested and never visited a doctor or hospital, so they aren’t included in the statistics at all.
The number of mild and asymptomatic cases must be large, but it’s unknown, so we can’t yet tell the true mortality rate.
I would go with the first argument. From what I’ve read, one person with the flu usually infects 1.3 people, whereas COVID 2019 infects 2 to 3 people. Until I read that statistic I didn’t take it seriously, since I believed it was less contagious (though deadlier) than the flu.
Now I think it will infect almost everyone (although, fortunately, the death rate isn’t spectacularly high). Social distancing, etc, will act to slow down the rate of infection.
It’s also misleading because the “recovered” number will lag far behind all the others. If you want to take that approach you have to look at regions where almost who have had it have recovered, and where the local system was able to test more than virtually only the very sickest (still likely to way undercount the numbers infected). Guangdong China fits. 1357 cases, 1303 recovered, 8 deaths, 46 still recovering v “not dead yet”. Deaths/those with a known outcome = 0.6%
Adding up all of China outside of Hubei I get for of known outcome so far of those with confirmed infections 118 deaths/12299 recovered = 0.9%.
Interpret how you want.
Can you explain what the HUGE improvement delaying infections by 2 weeks is? Do you interpret a 2 week delay of the spike as flattening the curve?
I’m curious. Do you actually let the stats decide your opinion on the appropriateness of the reaction level? Is there a fatality rate at which you’ll conclude the US is not “overreacting”? Is there a total number of cases? Rate of contagiousness?
I agree, we don’t have great idea of the actual stats in the US yet (probably because testing has been fucked up). So I’m wondering if your opinion on whether the US is “over-reacting” is based on those stats, or something else. If the death rate is 2%, is that enough? 2.5% Is a million cases overall enough? 10 million? 100 million? IS a 1.5% infection rate too high? 2.5%?
Where is your line drawn?
Hamlet, UltraVires very clearly states “I’m not saying that we are overreacting. I don’t know enough to say that.” Not expressing an opinion that the US is.
I’m curious - do you think that some form of economic analysis, using QALY, based on various levels of assumptions of true infection mortality rate and assumptions of differences in outcomes with different societal actions, both positive and negative, would be of value or offensive?
I don’t think it is offensive at all. We make tradeoffs all of the time based on things. For example, 30,000 people die per year so that we can drive cars. We have made a decision that the economic and personal benefits of automobiles outweigh 30,000 deaths per year.
So, I’ll play. The average age of death in Italy is 81. What are the statistical chances of a person age 81 dying before reaching age 82? Any mortality rate of this virus should be subtracted by that, no?
Sorry, found it:
If I am reading this right, an 81 year old has a 6% chance of dying before reaching age 82. At age 85 you have a 10% chance of dying before age 86.
Obviously, having the virus increases you chances of dying, but as the less healthy are the ones that would die anyways, could you say that many of those 8% who would die from the virus would likely be part, likely a large part, of the 6% who would die anyways?
Again, and I mean it, all life is precious and old people matter. But I think it is important to take these things into consideration. 81 years old is 23 years more than my father lived and 10 years longer than my grandfather lived. Is it worth billions, probably trillions of dollars to give people maybe a couple of extra years?
ETA: And can my posts have the disclaimer that I don’t support throwing the elderly to the wolves, nor do I think we shouldn’t care for them.
Oh sure, but when OBAMA proposed death panels, conservatives hated the idea.
Oh for fuck’s sake. This is a discussion board, right? Can we discuss the fucking topic instead of everything going back to politics? I’m trying to understand exactly what we are accomplishing here. And once again, as you seem to be unable to comprehend what I wrote, I AM NOT SAYING THAT WE ARE OVERREACTING.
I don’t know enough to say that, but it seems to me that we are if we are spending a bajillion dollars to save people who were very likely to die anyways.
It’s not just the death rate that we need to be concerned with; this virus also has a fairly high rate of hospitalization, which can be prohibitively expensive.
Also, don’t be so sure that the illness limits its fatilities to the elderly; for reasons that are not yet clear, the fatality rate (and rates of emergency medical care) in Italy is considerably higher than it was even in Wuhan, where the Chinese bungled the response for several weeks before finally flying into action. It could be that Italians smoke, but there’s at least one underlying factor that makes Americans of any age at risk of dying, and that’s obesity. About 1/3 or more of the country is seriously obese and well on their way to diabetes.
Beyond the risk of death and medical bankruptcy, this disease wreaks havoc on the lungs. It can potentially reduce pulmonary capacity forever, making individuals susceptible to respiratory failure in the future.
There’s also the fact that if we don’t freak out at least a little, the volume of incidence will overwhelm the healthcare system, putting both healthcare workers and patients, who have everything from heart attacks and strokes to traumatic injuries, at risk.
You are overly fixated on the mortality directly caused by COVID-19. Experts who are pushing for draconian measures are focused more on hospital bed capacity since the indirect effects of COVID-19 are far scarier.
Let’s say you, the individual who isn’t at a high risk of dying from COVID-19, gets into a serious car accident in the next two weeks. Under normal circumstances, you’d be able to receive good medical treatment and make a full recovery. But under a rampant COVID-19 scenario, you aren’t going to get good medical treatment. It may take an extra 30 minutes for an ambulance to get you to an ER, since EMT’s are too busy transporting COVID-19 victims. If you need a ventilator once you get to the ER, well, good luck with that! The care you will receive will be subpar and you may end up dying, but you won’t be counted in the COVID-19 statistics.
So as you’re crunching numbers to find out the value of an average COVID-19 fatality, crunch the numbers for all the people who die indirectly because of COVID-19. And also crunch the numbers for all the people who end up with lifelong complications that could have been avoided if their medical care hadn’t been impacted by COVID-19.
The two of us have wrangled over this topic in the past, back when you had a different username. Do you still believe that dead people represent savings rather than costs on society, as you did back then? Let me remind you that a lot of those dead people are providing valuable, tangible services to others. Letting them die is wasteful. This is true even if they are 81.
Quite a few of the guys calling the shots right now in this country are damn-near close to 81.
And I didn’t say differently. I asked if and how the stats would actually influence that determination. And he hasn’t answered.
I’m not a fan of QALY and in no way should it be the only thing used in these determinations. But it does have some value and is not, on its face, “offensive” to me.
My concern is that Trump–in his usual ham-fisted childish way–has turned the response to coronavirus from a health/medical situation into a political one. Liberals now have a politically vested interest in making it look as bad as possible and conservatives have a vested interest in trivializing it. We can’t possibly let the other side win because we all know they’re made up completely of idiots and morons.
Personally I think we’re going overboard. Massachusetts just closed down bars/restaurants starting Tuesday and schools are going to be closed for a month. A non-trivial number of people are going to go through hardship because of this.