Rioters can spend the rest of their quarantine in a jail cell.
CMC fnord!
Spreading out COVID hospitalizations/ICU utilization will prevent COVID deaths by not overwhelming current COVID treatment capacity. It will also give more time to increase future treatment capacity by having more ICU beds, ventilators, better techniques. In addition, as you say, it will decrease deaths/complications from other causes like ear infections.
Absolutely! That’s my point. The lockdowns and shelter-in-place procedures (shutting down many businesses, particularly small businesses) are not designed to prevent or stop the spread of the disease, only to slow it. To think we have to keep these procedures in place until we can stop the spread of the disease is applying them to a purpose they were never intended to serve.
They’re not wrong. In fact that’s how they will treat them.
Do you really think someone’s going to look at the world and say that there are enough hospital beds, it’s worth it to go to that ballgame now? They’re going to continue to do what they do until there’s a better world. Meaning vaccine or better treatment or the virus abates or better testing or something to lessen their risk. People aren’t going to take their turn in having the virus. They’ll opt out if they can.
One consideration is that COVID doesn’t have to kill a person to qualify as a ‘scary’ disease. Even those who don’t die gasp for air and end up in serious or even critical condition. In the US, that’s also a major medical bill that’s not going to be easy to repay.
Predictably, there are already reports of patients being turned away b/c they don’t have the right insurance, told they have to wait days or longer to get a test because they have to make sure their insurance pays for the test, and in some cases just flat out wait it out and hope for the best because they’re uninsured or under-insured. Waiting it out with COVID, hoping your immune system can just shake it off, can easily turn into a fatal decision, or at minimum put a serious dent in one’s finances.
Sure, now they can. But anyone dumb enough to go out a-rioting in May is going to find themselves very much in the minority and very much despised by everyone else.
Try to enforce this for a year, and it’ll never work. It’s not that people will riot; it’s just that they’ll start to ignore it, and you can’t lock up everyone.
I’d like to go back to the comparison with AIDS.
I remember before it came out that when I would go in to have my teeth cleaned or worked on the tech would not wear a mask or protective shield. Right after it they did and have always worn them ever since.
Well, it was stupid that they didn’t wear them before. I don’t need them breathing on me with my mouth clamped open. AIDS can’t be passed that way though and I’m not sure why you think a sexually transmitted disease is really a useful comparison to be chasing down.
We die. A large portion of us anyway.
The masks do cut down on the halitosis. My childhood dentist always chewed peppermint gum, bur he had one hygienist at one point who was both a smoker and a coffee swiller (she didn’t last long), and I think ate raw onions for breakfast. Her breath made my eyes water.
This is one reason so many people are so bad at judging likelihoods.
No, only a small portion will die. With a US population of over 300 million, even a small portion is a very large number of people, but it’s only a small portion of the US population (and similar for other countries). Even amongst those who become infected with the virus, only a small minority will die from it. There is no question that we should take actions to limit the damage this pandemic will cause, but to take the opinion that a large portion of the population will die is not being realistic.
Maybe large is the wrong word. How about “significant?” Think about this:
What if every flu season you and your loved ones had a 3% chance of dying? I’d feel pretty good about my chances for one year, or two. But 10? 15?
[QUOTE=RickJay;22250002 But anyone dumb enough to go out a-rioting in May is going to find themselves very much in the minority and very much despised by everyone else.
Try to enforce this for a year, and it’ll never work.[/QUOTE]
It will take less than a year.
I agree about May. But not much longer.
There are LOTS of people who live paycheck-to-paycheck. A one-time stimulus gift of $1200 will help them for perhaps one month.But what happens after a month?
The riots will begin when previously employed people get desperate --with no credit and no cash, rent due, groceries to buy, and nowhere to apply for a job because everything is still closed.
I mean, that’s part of it. But that’s not all of it. The widely-shared “lower the curve” graphic is overly simplistic in many ways.
All the policy interventions are to buy time. Time to research treatments, time to have people start making and wearing homemade masks. Time to ramp up hand sanitizer production. Time to expand hospitals.
Some of those things are just going to spread deaths out, but some of them will actually prevent deaths. If we find a useful treatment a month from now, then there’s a material difference between getting sick now and getting sick in 3 months, and it has nothing to do with the hospitals being overwhelmed.
If we all start wearing masks, the total number of deaths will be lower because transmission rates will be lower. That has nothing to do with hospitals being overwhelmed.
I would offer a different interpretation. The lockdowns mandated by governments were done to provide an orderly and structured process for continuing necessary societal functions. Lockdowns are inevitable. You either do them early like California and Oregon did, and are spared the first major wave of deaths, you do do them later, like New York and Italy did, and have a wave of deaths with single-digit percentages of your population infected, or you don’t mandate anything and let society melt down with disordered lockdowns, because who’s going to go sell groceries when double-digit percentages of the population is infected with a potentially lethal disease?
ETA: deleted duplicate post.
This is the answer, even if only a “significant” portion, not “large”. I noted elsewhere on QZ my reasons for fearing ~a million excess 2020 deaths in USA. If the excess mortality rate rises by ~36% from 2018’s ~2.8 million dead, that’s a million too many stiffs just in 2020. If a vaccine takes years, it’s worse. :eek:
I repeat the same comments in several threads but it seems they need to be said. The actual infection fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 is not known. It clearly is NOT 4%. My WAG is that it is actually in a very similar range as seasonal influenza, something like 0.1 to 0.2% among all adults as a group (and much much less in kids) but is in this first go around infecting a much larger portion of humanity because of little pre-existing immunity (yes I said “little” not “no”, as there are studies that suggest early jumps in antibody levels to the other cold-causing human coronaviruses provide some protection from symptomatic disease).
My WAG is herd immunity will be in play LONG before any vaccine is on the market, and with global death rates by the end of the calendar year in the range of a very bad influenza season, which is very bad, but the alternative approach of keeping global economies shut down for a year or more might kill many more. (Which is why we don’t do it for bad flu seasons. But looking for proof I find the evidence is actually mixed.)
What I think WILL happen is that various countries and regions that have flattened curves will gradually loosen up controls. Rates will creep up some, more in some places than others, but within what they determine to be acceptable parameters for a stretched out curve, loosening more as they drop back down again, and by mid to late summer new cases will be at a trickle even with no controls still in place. Then flu season will start and ICUs will fill up with flu cases that people will again not care much about. The big new numbers will likely come as China eventually loosens up more, which sooner or later they will do, and likely not waiting another year. (Unless they to no small degree have already been there but not well reported by local toadies afraid of passing on bad numbers to those above them.) A bad seasonal influenza season kills about 650,000 according to the WHO. I’ll WAG this does maybe a bit more its first year, maybe even a million but not millions, and much less annually after that (less yet if a vaccine eventually comes out and people take it which I won’t bank on).
One death is “significant” RioRico. The numbers I fear are significant. So yes a significant portion will die, pretty much no matter what. They already have and no matter what there will be more.
Excellent, one more thing I have noticed is fatalities are low in hotter areas relative to colder areas. For example, Indian subcontinent has a population of around 1.75 million people. Fingers crossed this virus may not cause as much damage as it did in Europe and USA ( New York).
Without a vaccine?
Eventually, everyone will get it and either die or recover with immunity.
The bug will scale down to a “normal” childhood illness, with every child getting it and subsequent immunity at an early age.
In children the severity of the infection seems to be very minor, almost trivial. Less dangerous than a normal seasonal flu, even.
The transition to get there could be ugly. 1% deathrate among young-ish adults, 5% among elderly, and 25%++ among the geriatrics.
And pray to <<insert your deity here>> that the curve of infections is flat enough that medical services don’t get overwhelmed.
This is really not supported by the data from New York.
New York City has a population of 8.4 million and there have been 11,500 confirmed deaths so far.
If everyone in NYC has been infected and everyone who’s going to die from it has already died, that’s a 0.13% fatality rate over the population as a whole. Those assumptions are of course fantasy.
Better estimates are that something like 20-40% of the population of the population has been infected, that maybe half of the deaths from the current set of infected has died, and that confirmed COVID-19 deaths is undercounting actual deaths due to COVID-19 (all-causes deaths have risen by 2-3 times the confirmed COVID count, they don’t have enough tests to test everyone who dies at home). And of course 20% of NYC residents are under 18, and I agree the death rate for that cohort seems to be very low.
The optimistic side of my (more realistic) assumptions above: 40% infection rate, 80% of population who might die, 50% of infected who are going to die have died, and deaths are being undercounted by a factor of 2 gives:
Eventual COVID deaths from current infected: 11,500*4 = 46,000
Actual COVID infected from over-18 population: 8.4m * 0.8 * .4 = 2.7m
Estimated Death rate for over-18 infected: 1.7%
It’s NOT just like a flu we have little immunity to.