From the rants thread, but responding here because I already wrote this before I saw LM's quarantine instruction.
Who are the ones dying though? It's the same type of people that die from the flu and other diseases. So again, in that context, what makes this virus more worthy of causing societal shutdowns than other viral outbreaks? There have been far deadlier outbreaks (in terms of mortality rate, not absolute numbers) in recent history that didn't cause nearly as big of a panic. That's what makes this whole thing seem like a manufactured crisis.
Our medical system has the capacity to deal with a steady number of severe flu cases every year. It doesn't have the capacity to deal with a surge of many millions of hospitalizations from covid. And that's what'll happen without major containment efforts, if you take a look at the growth curves. It's spreading exponentially, with the number of infected doubling every week or so. Left unchecked, it'll infect a large double-digit percentage of the US population. Perhaps 20% of those will need hospitalization and 1% will die.
However, if we don't, at the very least, manage to spread those infections out over time ("flatten the curve", as the slogan goes), we're risking a much higher death rate due to hospitals being utterly overwhelmed. For reference, look at Italy's healthcare system right now: it's in a state of massive crisis. Hospitals are operating way above capacity and treating people in hallways and lobbies. They have a huge shortages of supplies like respirators and not enough nurses and doctors. And that's the situation with 18k confirmed cases, not hundreds of thousands or millions.
Yes, it is true that the seasonal flu infects and kills a lot of people. But covid is a much worse predicament:
And something to point out: that 0.1% for the seasonal is the case fatality rate. And therefore the actual seasonal flu fatality rate could be something like 0.03%. Yes, it is true that that 2.3% for coronavirus is
also just the case fatality rate and the true rate is surely lower. However, we still have good reason to believe the true fatality rate is 0.5-1% for coronavirus with adequate healthcare provision.
Now, we could try to look at this entirely in economic terms because, yes, there's a big economic cost to prevention efforts. Regulators and insurers often try put a price on a human life, which I believe is often around $5 million. If hundreds of thousands or millions die, that's weighing in at the trillions in monetary damages, if we just go ahead and take that number for granted. Of course, you might point out most of these deaths were old people, not any human life. Not all, but yes, many. But, if I'm not mistaken, people in the business of putting a price on these things price a QALY even for someone in their 70s at being worth around $100k and they have a life expectancy of at least another 10 years (provided that you
have already made it to 75, you can expect around another 10-13 years of life). So... we're still talking about trillions in monetary damages from deaths alone. Of course, there are
other monetary costs to account for. At least a few percent of the infected could wind up with lasting fibrosis. I don't know how to estimate the cost of that, but considering that, again, we're talking about inflicting potentially millions of Americans with permanent lung damage, I think that'd be a huge lasting source of healthcare expenditure.
Leaving monetary issues asides, there's also a risk of political disaster ensuing when hundreds of thousands of angry people tell their governments "you let my grandpa die in the hallway without a respirator because you wanted to protect GDP." Not a good look.
…)
)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19782413/Covid_19_CFR_by_age_vs._US_Seasonal_Flu_3.png)
