6 ms·

Death of thousands or more??? You are living in some pleasant fantasy! Back in reality, the UK wants to infect about a cool 40M people (for the herd immunity!

by patrec 7y ago

Death of thousands or more??? You are living in some pleasant fantasy! Back in reality, the UK wants to infect about a cool 40M people (for the herd immunity!). Last I heard they expect 50% (20M) to get it in a 3 week interval. Meanwhile they have about 4k ICU beds, which are at close to capacity already. Assuming cocooning works so great that only 3% of people need urgent care (rather than a more likely 5-10%) and only for one week on average (again, unlikely!), that's 200k people for 4k beds for a period of 3 weeks. Surely the fatality rate for those 3% is going to be way over 60%. At which point you have close to half a million dead in those 3 weeks alone. I'd like to see numbers for a realistic scenario where this strategy does not result in something in the millions of deaths.

m0zg 7y ago
I guess we'll see, won't we. I mean for all the panic about Wuhan, fewer than 3.2K people died there so far, and when it all winds down, the death toll will likely be below 5K people. Probably fewer than died of flu complications in the same time frame. Given that the vast majority of the cases are not acute, probably most of their metro population was exposed to the virus, which is tens of millions of people. I know that extreme measures were taken to stop the spread (and such actions are infeasible in the West), but they did contain it: there are very few new cases or deaths. So no, there won't be "millions of deaths" or anything close to that, especially if older people are isolated.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Of course the death toll in Wuhan/China has been relatively limited BECAUSE they took drastic measures. When people start to say "all this panic for that..." it means that the measures taken have worked, not that they were unnecessary.
  - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
    Yup. The best case scenario is that restrictions are introduced, and they work so well that people complain that they were unnecessary. And remember folks, when it comes to exponential growth, the best time to act was yesterday.
    - RareSoft 7y ago
      The issue with that approach though is how do you effectively prevent reinfection of the region when all counter measures are suspended? Another carrier could reinfect the region again and all that previous work came to nothing.
      - necovek 7y ago
        It's never "nothing". For all we know (or don't), the virus might (or not) slow down spread during the warmer months in Europe and the US. Perhaps it could be effective enough to have multiple 2-week lockdown periods (eg. separated by 2 or 4 weeks non-locked-down periods), just to slow down the spread so health care systems can keep up? There is so many variables at play, and no simple model could come up with "the best" solution, if there ever is one.
      - lazylizard 7y ago
        By contact tracing, quarantine of people who are suspect, and social distancing. Look at taiwan , singapore, hong kong, macau. You can totally slow it down to a reasonable number of new cases daily such that the hospitals can handle. Just don't start like wuhan, iran, italy...
  - ithkuil 7y ago
    Reverse Tinkerbell Effect
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  Wuhan disagrees with your argument much more than it supports it. The Chinese response in Wuhan -- after the failure of the initial attempts to suppress any news of the virus -- were swift, draconian, and competent. They locked everything down, heavily restricted travel, erected 16 temporary hospitals (just for that region alone), and pumped a ton of medical supplies in to it. So the argument that follows from that is, "these are the measures required to achieve fewer than 3200 deaths."
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Which is something I explicitly pointed out. Shit like this isn't going to fly even in the UK, let alone in the US, so they seem to be acknowledging this simple fact and thinking of what they realistically can do in the absence of such "draconian" lockdown abilities. Which I think is smart. Especially if you consider that _any_ lockdown can't last for very long for economic reasons. A month or two at most, after which you start over. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you build up herd immunity.
    - tigershark 7y ago
      So in your opinion voluntarily causing in the best case close to 1M deaths is smart. I’m sure hitler would probably agree completely with you.
  - oezi 7y ago
    ... Only when you enact it at 400 cases (January 23rd) for a city of 15m or region of 55m (couple days later). Germany and France are at 4000 cases, so even draconian lock-down of the entire country might end up with 32.000 deaths each.
- patrec 7y ago
  I think you kinda missed the part where the UK is trying very hard to infect the majority of the population and China is trying very hard to stop more infections from taking place. Successfully it seems. > So no, there won't be "millions of deaths" or anything close to that I showed you some simple arithmetic, based on official figures from the UK government. Can you come up with better numbers or point out an obvious flaw in my calculation?
  - m0zg 7y ago
    There are no reliable estimates of overall fatality of the virus. Only the estimates of how many people _who required treatment_ have died, which the press deliberately misinterprets as the overall fatality rates most of the time, because higher numbers drive more clicks. Watch epidemiologists speak about this: they will go out of their way to point out that we don't know these percentages, and we won't know them for quite some time. Your "numbers" are bogus. You can easily see this if you look at the _initial_ estimates of H1N1, SARS and MERS. While COVID19 does appear to be deadlier, _nobody_ knows what the fatality rates will look like population-wide. Anyone who claims otherwise is full of shit. What we do know is that the numbers we currently have are the very uppermost bound of what's possible.
    - beaunative 7y ago
      Not true. These estimates are of overall fatality based on number of people diagnoised. Not based on those who required intensive treatment. That means we have crude estimate on death rate for people showing some symptoms. Crude in a way not everyone in the pool is recovered, or dead for that matter, so it's not possible to be that accurate yet, but it will only be higher not lower.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Wouldn’t we only have a crude estimate on the death rate for people diagnosed with the virus? If we find that many people are not getting tested for the virus and just recover by themselves, then it’s possible for the fatality rate to be lower.

by patrec 7y ago

m0zg 7y ago

I guess we'll see, won't we. I mean for all the panic about Wuhan, fewer than 3.2K people died there so far, and when it all winds down, the death toll will likely be below 5K people. Probably fewer than died of flu complications in the same time frame. Given that the vast majority of the cases are not acute, probably most of their metro population was exposed to the virus, which is tens of millions of people. I know that extreme measures were taken to stop the spread (and such actions are infeasible in the West), but they did contain it: there are very few new cases or deaths. So no, there won't be "millions of deaths" or anything close to that, especially if older people are isolated.

mytailorisrich 7y ago
Of course the death toll in Wuhan/China has been relatively limited BECAUSE they took drastic measures. When people start to say "all this panic for that..." it means that the measures taken have worked, not that they were unnecessary.
- disgruntledphd2 7y ago
  Yup. The best case scenario is that restrictions are introduced, and they work so well that people complain that they were unnecessary. And remember folks, when it comes to exponential growth, the best time to act was yesterday.
  - RareSoft 7y ago
    The issue with that approach though is how do you effectively prevent reinfection of the region when all counter measures are suspended? Another carrier could reinfect the region again and all that previous work came to nothing.
    - necovek 7y ago
      It's never "nothing". For all we know (or don't), the virus might (or not) slow down spread during the warmer months in Europe and the US. Perhaps it could be effective enough to have multiple 2-week lockdown periods (eg. separated by 2 or 4 weeks non-locked-down periods), just to slow down the spread so health care systems can keep up? There is so many variables at play, and no simple model could come up with "the best" solution, if there ever is one.
    - lazylizard 7y ago
      By contact tracing, quarantine of people who are suspect, and social distancing. Look at taiwan , singapore, hong kong, macau. You can totally slow it down to a reasonable number of new cases daily such that the hospitals can handle. Just don't start like wuhan, iran, italy...
- ithkuil 7y ago
  Reverse Tinkerbell Effect
thaumaturgy 7y ago
Wuhan disagrees with your argument much more than it supports it. The Chinese response in Wuhan -- after the failure of the initial attempts to suppress any news of the virus -- were swift, draconian, and competent. They locked everything down, heavily restricted travel, erected 16 temporary hospitals (just for that region alone), and pumped a ton of medical supplies in to it. So the argument that follows from that is, "these are the measures required to achieve fewer than 3200 deaths."
- m0zg 7y ago
  Which is something I explicitly pointed out. Shit like this isn't going to fly even in the UK, let alone in the US, so they seem to be acknowledging this simple fact and thinking of what they realistically can do in the absence of such "draconian" lockdown abilities. Which I think is smart. Especially if you consider that _any_ lockdown can't last for very long for economic reasons. A month or two at most, after which you start over. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you build up herd immunity.
  - tigershark 7y ago
    So in your opinion voluntarily causing in the best case close to 1M deaths is smart. I’m sure hitler would probably agree completely with you.
- oezi 7y ago
  ... Only when you enact it at 400 cases (January 23rd) for a city of 15m or region of 55m (couple days later). Germany and France are at 4000 cases, so even draconian lock-down of the entire country might end up with 32.000 deaths each.
patrec 7y ago
I think you kinda missed the part where the UK is trying very hard to infect the majority of the population and China is trying very hard to stop more infections from taking place. Successfully it seems. > So no, there won't be "millions of deaths" or anything close to that I showed you some simple arithmetic, based on official figures from the UK government. Can you come up with better numbers or point out an obvious flaw in my calculation?
- m0zg 7y ago
  There are no reliable estimates of overall fatality of the virus. Only the estimates of how many people _who required treatment_ have died, which the press deliberately misinterprets as the overall fatality rates most of the time, because higher numbers drive more clicks. Watch epidemiologists speak about this: they will go out of their way to point out that we don't know these percentages, and we won't know them for quite some time. Your "numbers" are bogus. You can easily see this if you look at the _initial_ estimates of H1N1, SARS and MERS. While COVID19 does appear to be deadlier, _nobody_ knows what the fatality rates will look like population-wide. Anyone who claims otherwise is full of shit. What we do know is that the numbers we currently have are the very uppermost bound of what's possible.
  - beaunative 7y ago
    Not true. These estimates are of overall fatality based on number of people diagnoised. Not based on those who required intensive treatment. That means we have crude estimate on death rate for people showing some symptoms. Crude in a way not everyone in the pool is recovered, or dead for that matter, so it's not possible to be that accurate yet, but it will only be higher not lower.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Wouldn’t we only have a crude estimate on the death rate for people diagnosed with the virus? If we find that many people are not getting tested for the virus and just recover by themselves, then it’s possible for the fatality rate to be lower.