Booray said:
Jinx 2 said:
Robert Wilson said:
I'm spitballing we lose 150-300k - so 3-6X a bad flu season. Should be viewed as a nice victory and have allowed us to roll on pretty smoothly as a society, but it won't. We will continue to lose our ever-lovin' minds and self induce massive damage over and above the death toll by the way we "handle" this.
We lose 20-60k/year as an *annuity* to the flu, and we don't give 1/17 of a sht, societally or economically speaking. Over 600k in the US will die this year of heart disease, about the same number from cancer. 160K will die from lower respiratory disease - we won't lose our minds over that one. But woo hoo corona, now that one will stop the planet on its axis and induce economic panic like you never saw, which will ultimately stack a lot more damage on top of that 150-300k.
False comparisons.
Heart disease isn't contagious, nor do literally hundreds of heart disease patients suddenly descend on medical facilities within a week or two, overwhelming their capacity.
Most heart patients don't endanger the medical professionals caring for them.
Although the effectiveness varies from year to year, medical professionals can and do get flu shots every year that offer some protection. Flu is typically not fatal to people who aren't already in poor health.
The coronavirus, on the other hand, is highly contagious, we don't have a cure, medical facilities in countries that didn't act soon enough (like Italy) are overwhelmed, the death rate is high enough that funeral homes are also overwhelmed. It's a crisis that's temporary, but dire, and strict measures to limit the spread and, we hope, the death toll are entirely appropriate.
Your analysis also ignores the impact on medical professionals. I wonder how many of them will view a death toll of 150,000 to 300,000 when people in their profession are disproportionately represented not only among the dead, but also among those sickened who may suffer permanent lung damage, lose weeks at work, etc.
I have a hard time believing my great university produced so many morons. It is one thing not to comprehend the risk before it manifests itself; it is a whole different level to see what is happening and still say we should carry on business as usual.
Our best minds are telling us that even with restrictive measures, expect at least 100K deaths. It is abundantly clear that without restrictive measures the death toll and havoc wrought on the medical system would be staggering. Literally beyond anything we have ever suffered in this country since the Civil War.
Yet people continue to question the need to protect ourselves?
This isn't the equivalent of the flu. It transmits more easily; the period of contagion is longer and harder to identify; the mortality rate is higher; we don't have therapeutics to treat it; and there is no vaccine. Seasonal flu does not present the risk of millions of deaths; this thing does. Those facts require what we implement extreme measures.If you are college educated and can't understand that distinction now, you are willfully ignorant.
I don't have any problem believing our university produced a lot of morons. I've read a lot of posts around here and spent 4 years meeting a lot of people around Baylor.
1. I didn't say we should just carry on business as usual. You've fallen into the false dichotomy that most people have. It's either do what we did, or we continue on business as usual. Meanwhile, we didn't just see 10 million jobless claims in the last 2 weeks, Goldman Sachs predicts 51 million jobless claims in 2Q. Chew on the human cost of that.
2. I didn't say it's the equivalent of the flu. But you and your buddy above sure got a hard on for that strawman. I compared the death totals we are likely to see. On the question this thread posed, based on what the White House is saying right now, seems like I might be pretty close.
The coronavirus is some really bad stuff. That said, we adopted a particular course of action designed solely to avoid coronavirus deaths in the short term, based on models that were probably nowhere near as good as we'd like to think they were (this is a problem with models everywhere all the time, an issue which no one likes to admit - people love to think their models are oh so great). We did so having absolutely no idea what the cost of that course of action would be. (Most of the people on this board are suffering very little, comparably, so they'll shrug it off just fine.). We also had no clue what the benefit would be; nor will we ever, really. No clue on the cost benefit analysis. Also no real clue on what the effect is on the second wave of this virus. Basically just hoping and praying we come up with something in the interim. If not, we do this rodeo again, and the costs are even higher. In part because of social media and 24/7 media coverage, the short term anecdotal completely overwhelmed any high level policy analysis here. Hope we get past this wave soon and we crack an antibody code or figure out a vaccine in the meantime, because we are totally flying blind on what 51 million jobless claims in a quarter does once, much less what it does on the second round.
I think there probably were better ways for us to have handled this, and I don't think (i) ignore it or (ii) shutter the economy are the only two options.
