So Monday Morning quarterbacking it so many years later, if little to no action was ever taken in the US for the COVID crisis (no shutdowns, no masking, no screenings, etc.) and the most basic action taken was a non-expedited optional vaccine…
Do you think the US death totals would have been high enough that they could be measured in % of the US population in whole numbers? 3.5 million being about 1%
What % would be dead?
Yes, likely. (I have no guess as to what the number would be.)
It would have been the dream-come-true of all the GOP eugenicists, certainly. Even the probability that their own parents or grandparents might have been among those piled up in refrigerated trucks, would not have dampened their glee.
Early version 0 COVID was rather deadly to the elderly & respiratory-impaired but not that hugely deadly to everyone else.
If the government did nothing but gather and honestly report the illness, hospitalization, and death statistics, I think pretty quickly the public would have responded or panicked on their own to the rapidly exploding death toll among the vulnerable. And they’d mask or hide at home if at all possible. And lots of public facing businesses would fail for lack of customers. And so on. And maybe even demand their government do something.
The obvious question is whether a government that chose to do nothing would also choose to honestly report the consequences or would have chosen to cover the whole thing up.
As a different thought experiment, imagine there had been no COVID in 2019 anywhere on Earth. The word COVID doesn’t exist as of today. Instead some novel unknown disease starts breaking out in Wuhan next week in mid Sep 2026. Which disease is exactly the same thing we now label COVID-19 as it emerged back then. Knowing nothing of what really happened in 2019, what do the present Chinese, US, etc., authorities do with this surprise 2026 pandemic? At least in the USA I bet the response is far worse than the one we had in 2020.
Moderating: I think this question is basically a political one, more than a scientific one. (And it’s not personal, etc.) So it’s better suited for P&E than for QZ.
@Hampshire , if you want a more free-form discussion, you can ask for a “hijacks allowed” status. If you want a tighter discussion, that’s the default for P&E. Let us know, and we’ll move the thread.
You’ll probably get more engagement there anyway. I suspect a lot of posters have muted this forum.
I’m good with P&E.
More interested in how we might have ended up if the extreme right got the say in all decisions of the time. Those who argued that nothing should have been shutdown, masking is useless, remote learning destroyed a generation, big pharma drove the vaccine, etc. The usual arguments they like to make.
Presumably most people on the right would have then lived their lives with no precautions, but people of left-leaning politics would probably mask up, get vaccines, etc. So there would likely be no scenario where 100% of Americans go unprotected recklessly. It would be something like 50% of folks being reckless and the other half being cautious. That would make the Covid-prediction numbers even trickier to calculate, especially when you add in all the other factors, such as left-leaning people usually living in urban cities and right-leaning folks being more in the suburbs and rurals.
You’re assuming the same actions and attitudes would become left-coded and right-coded under this counterfactual scenario. I don’t think they would. I think the politics would play out in very different and probably-not-at-all-predictable ways.
And yeah, I would also estimate that about 1% of the population would die. (IIRC, about 2% of cases in March 2020 ended in death, and in this scenario, it seems very plausible that half or more of the population would be infected before they could be vaccinated, even if treatment improved somewhat over the coming months.)
Italy got hit hard, so I did some checking. According to the figures I found, the population at that time was 59.9 million, and the deaths attributed to COVID were 198,683. That gives us a figure of 0.33% of the population. Since medical care in the U.S. is among the best in the world, it appears highly unlikely that you would have reached the 1.0% threshold.
More checking reveals that Peru had the highest reported statistics, and their death toll was, according to the figures stated, 0.6% of the population.
I’ve seen “what if we’d done nothing?” used as a right-wing talking point. E.g.: “Imagine if COVID had happened in the 80s! It would have blown over in a week, and we would have shrugged and said ‘Gee, that sure was a bad flu season!’”
The shutdowns only occurred in March 2020 when restaurants were already deserted – as I recall, because we went to one in New Jersey on the evening when the legal closure was set for midnight.
Schools? Teachers strikes would have been tremendously widespread if districts forced them to come to work in person.
As to what would have happened if the U.S. FDA refused to expedite vaccine approval, well, a lot of immunocompromised people like me would have died. I guess I would have tried to get it in Canada, but they would have had to reserve it first for their own.
The problem is that the hospitals would have been overwhelmed. They were already overwhelmed (as were the morgues), even with the precautions. So, there wouldn’t be great care to be had.
Good point. In fact, I specifically remember that very fact when Italy was being discussed in the news. Even so, nobody reached the 1.0% threshold, at least as far as we know.
Looking online, I think the highest % of a countries population who died was 0.67% in Peru.
In order for a nation to have a huge death rate from covid it would likely require a mix of things:
A massive population of elderly people
No vaccines
No efforts to mitigate the spread
Extremely poor health care infrastructure
Something like 40% of the people who died in the US during the initial covid wave were people in nursing homes, despite them making up a tiny % of the population.
Death rate from covid for people in their 30s was something like 0.03%, but death rate for people age 80+ was about 16%.
I think that if you want to study one region it should not be Italy as a whole, but Lombardy and Veneto, who were among the first and hardest hit regions in Europe and who followed two different epidemic control strategies. The Lancet has done just that. Be warned, it is a short article (with links), but a complex subject and the results are not black and white:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30099-2/fulltext
Either you are writing in jest, or you mean medical care in the U.S. is among the best in the world for those who can afford it, which is not the majority. And it is not conceived to be used against a mass event like a wide-spread epidemy, much less a pandemy.
Mortality was highest among the elderly, immuno-supressed people, people with diabetes and the severly overweight. Concerning age, Monaco has the highest percentage of elderly people, with 36.0% of its population aged 65 and over. Japan follows with 30.0% of its population in the same age group. Diabetes? USA may be among the contenders. Overweight? American Samoa, I’ve heard, and much of the rich Middle-East. And the USA again.
But I would not treat the USA as one uniform country. The differences between regions, states, urban/rural, rich and poor, by “race” etc. are enormous.
I think left on its own, without any action by the state to palliate and mitigate the effects, Covid would have killed more than one per cent of the population. Perhaps three percent, which is only one order of magnitude more than what actually happened, officially.
I understand, and your point about our “pay for health” system is well taken, but the OP stipulated the U.S. as a whole and not a particularly hard hit region. That being the case, my comparisons are also based on particular nations as a whole.
Here is a telling statistic connected to a specific region. The Spanish flu pandemic death toll for Europe at a time when medical care was garbage when compared to today and could qualify as “doing nothing”, 1.1% of the European population died.
Italy had lockdowns, quarantines, remote work and school, bans on gatherings (including religious services)…
How does looking at Italy tell us what happens with no government mandates?
A better comparison may be Sweden, which recommended but didn’t mandate most covid precautions. Sweden has a less dense population and better healthcare than the US, so it makes more sense to compare it to Denmark and Norway, which are more similar. (Norway is less urban and Denmark more, Sweden would be expected to fall between them.) Sweden had more deaths due to covid than either of its neighbors, but its total mortality during the pandemic was only a little higher. It presumably had fewer deaths from drug abuse, people not getting cancer diagnosed in time, etc.
Yep. This is what I was going to say. It’s the 2nd and 3rd order consequences that caused a lot of “non-Covid” death.
They did not do nothing, and 1.1% of Europeans was 2.64 million excess deaths.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-2659.2009.00080.x
Those were more than the casualties in the war, which is a lot, and it was a very unusual flu. It killed mostly the young, not the old. And it only peaked for about two months, getting markedly more benign quickly. The flu is also much more contagious, it transmits like a wild fire, even compared to Covid. Covid killed the elderly, not the young, and it is not clear how fast it would evolve to become more benign unchecked. The different strains became often more virulent, not less, during the first years of the pandemic.
I would not compare Covid with the flu, but with SARS and MERS. And then I woud rejoice that the mortality was so much lower!
On the news at that time, it was reported that Italy was very slow and unorganized in their response to COVID and, once the dire situation revealed itself further, they approached it in a more urgent fashion. I actually remember that on the news because of my Italian heritage and heightened interest in Italian affairs.
Italy was one of the first nations hit hard, and didn’t react instantly. But they instituted many mandated public responses, most before covid spread out of the first urban centers it hit.