9 ms·

At this point, I'm actually starting to wonder. If we literally do nothing about the virus, or do the bare minimum, the worst case scenario based on the numbers

by sershe 7y ago

At this point, I'm actually starting to wonder. If we literally do nothing about the virus, or do the bare minimum, the worst case scenario based on the numbers I hear is 7.7b * 0.6 (total infections) * 0.02-0.03 (presumed mortality rate after the healthcare system collapses MINUS the rate if it doesn't), ~115m people are going to die worldwide. This appears to me to be the absolute worst case scenario given current knowledge; gradually slowing infection rates, the fact that the developing world skews younger and is less connected, etc., may make it better. That 115m will skew heavily towards the elderly, i.e. loss in days-of-life would be significantly less than you would expect. Now, if you put value on days of human life (which you totally can do; first, as a matter of policy, you won't pay a million dollars to give a 90 year old another year of life, nor would you pay a billion to cure cancer in one teenager; second, you do it every day when you take quantifiable risks to make money or for convenience, everything from being a logger or a deep sea fisherman, to merely driving)... if you put value on human life, how much would this waste of life be worth? And how much waste of life is a worldwide recession or depression going to produce - in direct deaths, days lost by billions of people in s terrible economy, esp. if it gets to GD levels or worse, or in the developing world where it definitely will if the economy grinds to a halt; and on top of that in purely monetary terms, as people are not able to do things from buying houses to merely making ends meet, depending on the circumstances? At this point everybody seems to admit it's beyond containment and the only thing we are trying to do is flatten the curve and prevent the deaths. Is entering a recession, or worse a depression and risking a total collapse really worth it? I am starting to doubt it. PS. Frankly this reminds me of plane crash reporting. Everybody is, comparatively speaking, overreacting because the event is visible and distinct, even though many more people die in cars every day.

isignal 7y ago
There's a billion people in India and so far the mortality and spread rates there aren't similar to other countries. There is a theory that humid and warm places will not have these mortality rates (as validated by our common sense that summer time flu is less common). I don't think we have enough information about the virus to generalize to the whole world yet.
- mike_d 7y ago
  > There's a billion people in India and so far the mortality and spread rates there aren't similar to other countries That is a lack of testing, same as what keeps US numbers depressed. India is severely lacking in cohesive response to viral outbreaks, to the point they are still dealing with a Swine Flu epidemic from 2009 (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/9-swine-flu-deaths-uttar-pradesh-17-pac-jawans-test-positive-1651342-2020-03-01 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/9-swine-flu-deaths-utt...) > There is a theory that humid and warm places will not have these mortality rate There is no scientific evidence to support this. The wild spread in the Middle East indicates heat may not be a factor.
  - virmundi 7y ago
    The theory is more the humidity. The virus gets trapped in vapor and pulled harmlessly to the ground. The counter to the theory is that at least in developed countries people flee the humidity by living in low humidity air conditioning.
  - northern-lights 7y ago
    Not quite: https://www.umaryland.edu/news/archived-news/march-2020/researchers-predict-potential-spread-and-seasonality-for-covid-19-.php https://www.umaryland.edu/news/archived-news/march-2020/rese...
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  We have an explosion of cases in New Orleans. I don’t think we’re off the hook
gentleman11 7y ago
The mortality rate explodes when there is a shortage of medical equipment
- sershe 7y ago
  Interestingly, currently shortages are being caused by the reaction, not the virus. King County is reporting "Growing COVID-19 concerns and closures have led to canceled blood drives and 2500 lost donations, putting our local blood supply in danger of collapse." Factory closures and disrupted supply chains put manufactured supplies in danger going forward, too. Again, we need to make sure that the cure is worse than the disease.
throwanem 7y ago
This makes sense if you assume that tens of millions of people suddenly dying will have no effect on the economies in which they do so. That's quite an assumption!
- sershe 7y ago
  That is true. Although, they (we?) won't all die at once. 100s of people are dying now, mostly very elderly. If the panic wasn't ramped up, people would have barely noticed this against the background rate of deaths from other diseases. They would have started noticing when it got to around Italian levels, and very ineffectual lockdown/self-quarantine would start that wouldn't affect the economy nearly as much as it has been currently affected in countries with barely any deaths. Then there'd be a month or so of panic as ~everyone gets it and lots of people die. Then it's back to normal. Alternatively, as a base case we are going to have years of a recession. Evictions, foreclosures, wiped out retirements, divorces, ruined childhoods and early careers messing up millions of lives for decades, suicides, preventable deaths in the developing world where losing your livelihood is a much bigger deal, potential flare-up of wars as young men there don't have jobs, etc.
  - throwanem 7y ago
    "Then it's back to normal" remains an utterly risible claim for what happens after two or three million Americans die in the span of a month.
    - sershe 7y ago
      Why? What, exactly, do you predict is going to happen economically once the spike would have passed esp. given the age distribution of the deaths? I honestly tried to think about it and the only tangential thing I could definitely predict is LOTS of people from the city councils all the way to the white house not being re-elected. Which, obviously, made me even more cynical.
nimblegorilla 7y ago
Sidestepping the issue of how much a human life is worth you are also missing that the death rate would skyrocket if everyone gets sick and needed treatment at the same time.
- drcross 7y ago
  It's also ignoring the fact that no one can be sick from any other cause during the next nine months because hospitals will be at capacity.
- sershe 7y ago
  I did take that into account. From what I see reported, death rate with access to health care is 0.5%, without 2.5-3.5%. So the difference is the 2-3% that I was using.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
There is no option B like you seem to be implying. I guarantee if we did absolutely nothing, and the hospitals predictably became overwhelmed and people were dying without any access to care, and you'd also start to see significantly more cases of younger people dying, there would be mass panic and self quarantine in any case.
- sershe 7y ago
  It's true that I didn't take that into account, I suppose. However, I'm not sure what the scope of the panic is going to be... self-imposed quarantine, again, will be selective location-wise, risk-wise, and overall won't prevent the economy from functioning nearly as much as what is currently going on. In fact, when Italian healthcare was collapsing a doctor on FB was railing at people for thinking it was bad and still going out to dinner. But yeah that's another factor against this.
bearzoo 7y ago
This is a bizarre analysis in my opinion. It’s not all about the mortality rate, it’s also about spending in general.
ummonk 7y ago
> At this point everybody seems to admit it's beyond containment and the only thing we are trying to do is flatten the curve and prevent the deaths. No. Only the UK is operating on that fatalist assumption. South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Singapore have all successfully contained it, and Italy is starting to do so as well.
- dmix 7y ago
  I keep hearing this is the UK policy on HN but it’s been repeatedly denied by the authorities? The UK’s reactive containment policy is also what almost every country is doing as well, even in Europe, besides a few exceptions like Italy and Spain who have way higher rates. For one thing the UK has already announced harsher law enforcement policies than what we have here in Canada. > Matt Hancock insists 'herd immunity' not part of government's plan for tackling coronavirus > Mr Hancock added: "Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy. Our goal is to protect life from this virus, our strategy is to protect the most vulnerable and protect the NHS through contain, delay, research and mitigate." https://politicshome.com/news/uk/health-and-care/illnesstreatments/news/110595/matt-hancock-insists-herd-immunity-not-part https://politicshome.com/news/uk/health-and-care/illnesstrea...
  - ummonk 7y ago
    The UK government has been explicit that they don't expect to new able to contain the virus in the long term, and are merely trying flatten the curve. They might not be trying to build herd immunity intentionally, but they certainly have given up on being able to contain the virus isn the long run, according to their own statements.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
The US will go under extreme lockdown at 100k cases. No way we will see 327m * 0.6 cases.
- tcbawo 7y ago
  The US may have already passed 100k cases. Is anyone performing randomized tests and publishing the results? That should give us a real sense for how far it's spread. The trouble is that the growth rate is so great, it's a moving target.
- sershe 7y ago
  Only because of the panic. The narrative fairly recently was "why bother, more people die from the flu"; which isn't true, but basically the effect of everyone around merely being sick, with 80+% mild cases, would not be nearly as dramatic as envisioned, I think. I did not account for that in my original comment, but it's not going to be end of the world. And yes, we will eventually get to 40-60% infection rate unless we go into a permanent lockdown, the question is just how fast.
rogerthis 7y ago
Poster probably not human.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  That’s far from the most inhumane post I’ve seen on HN
- sershe 7y ago
  Can you operationalize that? I find it very hard to be charitable with that kind of response; by "not human", do you mean "not donates-to-save-one-kid-with-cute-photo-and-a-story-instead-of-100-kids-without-those human"?
sdkaufman 7y ago
First of all, let's be clear that flattening the curve WILL save lives, even if the same number of people ultimately get exposed to the virus. Not only will we avoid overrunning hospitals, we also buy ourselves valuable time to ramp up production on equipment like ventilators, necessary medicine and protective gear, find better treatments and cures, and perhaps develop a vaccine. So, is saving lives worth the economic impact? I think the answer is very simple. Would you rather lose your job or your parents?
- sershe 7y ago
  I did account for the death rate when the healthcare system is overwhelmed; I have no doubt it will save lives. Then, as I also said, if you are 60 and your very old mother is on her death bed, and you get to buy her one more week of life by eliminating your entire retirements savings, would you do it? If not, after that we are so to speak just haggling about the price. Oh, and what if I came for your retirement savings because they could save my mother, that you don't even know? There are trade-off on another level too. Recessions have very real human consequences that I mentioned in another comment. Many of them involve deaths, but many more just involve ruined lives. I'd sooner let one 80yo die than make one 40yo miserable for the rest of his life.
js2 7y ago
I'll burn karma for this: Shit hacker news says.
- webninja 7y ago
  It’s worth exploring every angle and weighing the pros and cons. He brings up the Statistical Value of a Human Life (SVHL) which is a valid point yet uncomfortable to people who are new to learning how our world functions. Also some of us are old enough to still remember the swine flu (H1N1) and the bird flu (H5N1).

by sershe 7y ago

isignal 7y ago

There's a billion people in India and so far the mortality and spread rates there aren't similar to other countries. There is a theory that humid and warm places will not have these mortality rates (as validated by our common sense that summer time flu is less common). I don't think we have enough information about the virus to generalize to the whole world yet.

mike_d 7y ago
> There's a billion people in India and so far the mortality and spread rates there aren't similar to other countries That is a lack of testing, same as what keeps US numbers depressed. India is severely lacking in cohesive response to viral outbreaks, to the point they are still dealing with a Swine Flu epidemic from 2009 (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/9-swine-flu-deaths-uttar-pradesh-17-pac-jawans-test-positive-1651342-2020-03-01 https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/9-swine-flu-deaths-utt...) > There is a theory that humid and warm places will not have these mortality rate There is no scientific evidence to support this. The wild spread in the Middle East indicates heat may not be a factor.
- virmundi 7y ago
  The theory is more the humidity. The virus gets trapped in vapor and pulled harmlessly to the ground. The counter to the theory is that at least in developed countries people flee the humidity by living in low humidity air conditioning.
- northern-lights 7y ago
  Not quite: https://www.umaryland.edu/news/archived-news/march-2020/researchers-predict-potential-spread-and-seasonality-for-covid-19-.php https://www.umaryland.edu/news/archived-news/march-2020/rese...
selimthegrim 7y ago
We have an explosion of cases in New Orleans. I don’t think we’re off the hook

gentleman11 7y ago

The mortality rate explodes when there is a shortage of medical equipment

sershe 7y ago
Interestingly, currently shortages are being caused by the reaction, not the virus. King County is reporting "Growing COVID-19 concerns and closures have led to canceled blood drives and 2500 lost donations, putting our local blood supply in danger of collapse." Factory closures and disrupted supply chains put manufactured supplies in danger going forward, too. Again, we need to make sure that the cure is worse than the disease.

throwanem 7y ago

This makes sense if you assume that tens of millions of people suddenly dying will have no effect on the economies in which they do so. That's quite an assumption!

sershe 7y ago
That is true. Although, they (we?) won't all die at once. 100s of people are dying now, mostly very elderly. If the panic wasn't ramped up, people would have barely noticed this against the background rate of deaths from other diseases. They would have started noticing when it got to around Italian levels, and very ineffectual lockdown/self-quarantine would start that wouldn't affect the economy nearly as much as it has been currently affected in countries with barely any deaths. Then there'd be a month or so of panic as ~everyone gets it and lots of people die. Then it's back to normal. Alternatively, as a base case we are going to have years of a recession. Evictions, foreclosures, wiped out retirements, divorces, ruined childhoods and early careers messing up millions of lives for decades, suicides, preventable deaths in the developing world where losing your livelihood is a much bigger deal, potential flare-up of wars as young men there don't have jobs, etc.
- throwanem 7y ago
  "Then it's back to normal" remains an utterly risible claim for what happens after two or three million Americans die in the span of a month.
  - sershe 7y ago
    Why? What, exactly, do you predict is going to happen economically once the spike would have passed esp. given the age distribution of the deaths? I honestly tried to think about it and the only tangential thing I could definitely predict is LOTS of people from the city councils all the way to the white house not being re-elected. Which, obviously, made me even more cynical.

nimblegorilla 7y ago

Sidestepping the issue of how much a human life is worth you are also missing that the death rate would skyrocket if everyone gets sick and needed treatment at the same time.

drcross 7y ago
It's also ignoring the fact that no one can be sick from any other cause during the next nine months because hospitals will be at capacity.
sershe 7y ago
I did take that into account. From what I see reported, death rate with access to health care is 0.5%, without 2.5-3.5%. So the difference is the 2-3% that I was using.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

There is no option B like you seem to be implying. I guarantee if we did absolutely nothing, and the hospitals predictably became overwhelmed and people were dying without any access to care, and you'd also start to see significantly more cases of younger people dying, there would be mass panic and self quarantine in any case.

sershe 7y ago
It's true that I didn't take that into account, I suppose. However, I'm not sure what the scope of the panic is going to be... self-imposed quarantine, again, will be selective location-wise, risk-wise, and overall won't prevent the economy from functioning nearly as much as what is currently going on. In fact, when Italian healthcare was collapsing a doctor on FB was railing at people for thinking it was bad and still going out to dinner. But yeah that's another factor against this.

bearzoo 7y ago

This is a bizarre analysis in my opinion. It’s not all about the mortality rate, it’s also about spending in general.

ummonk 7y ago

> At this point everybody seems to admit it's beyond containment and the only thing we are trying to do is flatten the curve and prevent the deaths. No. Only the UK is operating on that fatalist assumption. South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Singapore have all successfully contained it, and Italy is starting to do so as well.

dmix 7y ago
I keep hearing this is the UK policy on HN but it’s been repeatedly denied by the authorities? The UK’s reactive containment policy is also what almost every country is doing as well, even in Europe, besides a few exceptions like Italy and Spain who have way higher rates. For one thing the UK has already announced harsher law enforcement policies than what we have here in Canada. > Matt Hancock insists 'herd immunity' not part of government's plan for tackling coronavirus > Mr Hancock added: "Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy. Our goal is to protect life from this virus, our strategy is to protect the most vulnerable and protect the NHS through contain, delay, research and mitigate." https://politicshome.com/news/uk/health-and-care/illnesstreatments/news/110595/matt-hancock-insists-herd-immunity-not-part https://politicshome.com/news/uk/health-and-care/illnesstrea...
- ummonk 7y ago
  The UK government has been explicit that they don't expect to new able to contain the virus in the long term, and are merely trying flatten the curve. They might not be trying to build herd immunity intentionally, but they certainly have given up on being able to contain the virus isn the long run, according to their own statements.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

The US will go under extreme lockdown at 100k cases. No way we will see 327m * 0.6 cases.

tcbawo 7y ago
The US may have already passed 100k cases. Is anyone performing randomized tests and publishing the results? That should give us a real sense for how far it's spread. The trouble is that the growth rate is so great, it's a moving target.
sershe 7y ago
Only because of the panic. The narrative fairly recently was "why bother, more people die from the flu"; which isn't true, but basically the effect of everyone around merely being sick, with 80+% mild cases, would not be nearly as dramatic as envisioned, I think. I did not account for that in my original comment, but it's not going to be end of the world. And yes, we will eventually get to 40-60% infection rate unless we go into a permanent lockdown, the question is just how fast.

rogerthis 7y ago

Poster probably not human.

selimthegrim 7y ago
That’s far from the most inhumane post I’ve seen on HN
sershe 7y ago
Can you operationalize that? I find it very hard to be charitable with that kind of response; by "not human", do you mean "not donates-to-save-one-kid-with-cute-photo-and-a-story-instead-of-100-kids-without-those human"?

sdkaufman 7y ago

First of all, let's be clear that flattening the curve WILL save lives, even if the same number of people ultimately get exposed to the virus. Not only will we avoid overrunning hospitals, we also buy ourselves valuable time to ramp up production on equipment like ventilators, necessary medicine and protective gear, find better treatments and cures, and perhaps develop a vaccine. So, is saving lives worth the economic impact? I think the answer is very simple. Would you rather lose your job or your parents?

sershe 7y ago
I did account for the death rate when the healthcare system is overwhelmed; I have no doubt it will save lives. Then, as I also said, if you are 60 and your very old mother is on her death bed, and you get to buy her one more week of life by eliminating your entire retirements savings, would you do it? If not, after that we are so to speak just haggling about the price. Oh, and what if I came for your retirement savings because they could save my mother, that you don't even know? There are trade-off on another level too. Recessions have very real human consequences that I mentioned in another comment. Many of them involve deaths, but many more just involve ruined lives. I'd sooner let one 80yo die than make one 40yo miserable for the rest of his life.

js2 7y ago

I'll burn karma for this: Shit hacker news says.

webninja 7y ago
It’s worth exploring every angle and weighing the pros and cons. He brings up the Statistical Value of a Human Life (SVHL) which is a valid point yet uncomfortable to people who are new to learning how our world functions. Also some of us are old enough to still remember the swine flu (H1N1) and the bird flu (H5N1).