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AFAIK, covid-19 is basically a "slightly worse flu". Most people are not at risk of dying and in fact most people don't even need to go to the hospital to recov

by umvi 7y ago

AFAIK, covid-19 is basically a "slightly worse flu". Most people are not at risk of dying and in fact most people don't even need to go to the hospital to recover. Surely there has to be a balance between protecting the vulnerable at the cost of ruining the economy and protecting the economy at the cost of ruining the vulnerable. How about instead of shutting down planet earth we advise people over the age of 60 to self-quarantine for a few months. The disease will run its course and then they will be protected by herd immunity. Neighbors and friends can drop off supplies on the front doorstep during this time.

satya71 7y ago
Sorry this is not a "slightly worse flu". The "Spanish Flu" was both less virulent and less deadly and killed ~50 million world-wide. This is the mostly deadly pandemic since the "Black Death" of medieval times.
- nostromo 7y ago
  It’s not more deadly. The fatality rate is 0.6% or so, and almost entirely focused on the very old or il.
  - MaybiusStrip 7y ago
    You can't just cherry-pick South Korea's case fatality rate because it's convenient to your argument. The case fatality rate worldwide is currently 3.7%. Regardless of what the reasons for that may be and whether it will remain the same, that is a cold, hard, fact about the current reality. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpreting-the-case-fatality-rate https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpr...
- djsumdog 7y ago
  It's no where near the Black Death. From what I've heard from multiple people are the limits are most likely a lower bound of 0.6% and an upper of maybe 1.5%. That's still a lot of people. America is ~330 million. 1% is more than 3 million. Assuming only 1/3 of Americans get infected, there could still be an upper bound of a million people dying (although it'll more like be 300k ~ 1m with all the efforts to spread out everything).
arbitrary_name 7y ago
It is not a slightly worse flu though. There are numerous experts in record pointing to it's long incubation time, that some people are asymptomatic, that it may be airborne, the death rate... It is not normal seasonal flu and it demands a different response. Now, what that response is can be debated, but it should be more than doing nothing.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  > that it may be airborne To be pedantic, it's not airborne. It's a respiratory virus. An airborne virus can linger in the air, possibly for hours or even a day. It's much much more transmissible. The danger with SARS-cov2 is that, when going back to some of these cities where the first patients appeared, WHO researchers have found people with large viral load in their throats, and they didn't develop symptoms for over a week! So just being within 3~4 feet of them breathing could spread the disease. Sure, it's less likely than if they coughed or you shook hands, but it's still dangerous.
jogjayr 7y ago
The difference is that for regular flu we have vaccines, herd immunity, and medicines that work. We have none of those things for COVID-19. The effect of that is to drive up hospitalization rates to the point that it's a DDoS on the healthcare system. People suffering from unrelated issues now can't get care on time, and some of them will die too. We don't even know for certain if getting it once makes you immune. How do you know herd immunity will work if you don't have the answer to something basic like that? Isolating just over-60s only works to some extent. What about the healthcare and nursing home workers whom they interact with?
ChrisClark 7y ago
If you are ignorant of the virus, why talk about it like this? 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50, and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs. If you don't take paranoid drastic measures, many millions will die. If you do take paranoid drastic measures, lives will be saved, and then everyone will call you crazy for taking those measures because it ended up not that bad. Just like people think Y2K was an overblown non-issue. Because it was fixed by millions of people working hard.
- umvi 7y ago
  > 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50 And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? When the mortality rate is 0.2% for people < 60 years old, I just have a hard time believing that it requires the response we've been giving it. I would bet that for healthy, non-vulnerable adults (i.e. they don't have a pre-existing condition that makes them extra susceptible) the death rate is virtually 0%. I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.
  - MaybiusStrip 7y ago
    >And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance. > I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction. Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why? 1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis? 2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario. I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb https://twitter.com/nntaleb

by umvi 7y ago

satya71 7y ago

Sorry this is not a "slightly worse flu". The "Spanish Flu" was both less virulent and less deadly and killed ~50 million world-wide. This is the mostly deadly pandemic since the "Black Death" of medieval times.

nostromo 7y ago
It’s not more deadly. The fatality rate is 0.6% or so, and almost entirely focused on the very old or il.
- MaybiusStrip 7y ago
  You can't just cherry-pick South Korea's case fatality rate because it's convenient to your argument. The case fatality rate worldwide is currently 3.7%. Regardless of what the reasons for that may be and whether it will remain the same, that is a cold, hard, fact about the current reality. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpreting-the-case-fatality-rate https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpr...
djsumdog 7y ago
It's no where near the Black Death. From what I've heard from multiple people are the limits are most likely a lower bound of 0.6% and an upper of maybe 1.5%. That's still a lot of people. America is ~330 million. 1% is more than 3 million. Assuming only 1/3 of Americans get infected, there could still be an upper bound of a million people dying (although it'll more like be 300k ~ 1m with all the efforts to spread out everything).

arbitrary_name 7y ago

It is not a slightly worse flu though. There are numerous experts in record pointing to it's long incubation time, that some people are asymptomatic, that it may be airborne, the death rate... It is not normal seasonal flu and it demands a different response. Now, what that response is can be debated, but it should be more than doing nothing.

djsumdog 7y ago
> that it may be airborne To be pedantic, it's not airborne. It's a respiratory virus. An airborne virus can linger in the air, possibly for hours or even a day. It's much much more transmissible. The danger with SARS-cov2 is that, when going back to some of these cities where the first patients appeared, WHO researchers have found people with large viral load in their throats, and they didn't develop symptoms for over a week! So just being within 3~4 feet of them breathing could spread the disease. Sure, it's less likely than if they coughed or you shook hands, but it's still dangerous.

jogjayr 7y ago

The difference is that for regular flu we have vaccines, herd immunity, and medicines that work. We have none of those things for COVID-19. The effect of that is to drive up hospitalization rates to the point that it's a DDoS on the healthcare system. People suffering from unrelated issues now can't get care on time, and some of them will die too. We don't even know for certain if getting it once makes you immune. How do you know herd immunity will work if you don't have the answer to something basic like that? Isolating just over-60s only works to some extent. What about the healthcare and nursing home workers whom they interact with?

ChrisClark 7y ago

If you are ignorant of the virus, why talk about it like this? 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50, and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs. If you don't take paranoid drastic measures, many millions will die. If you do take paranoid drastic measures, lives will be saved, and then everyone will call you crazy for taking those measures because it ended up not that bad. Just like people think Y2K was an overblown non-issue. Because it was fixed by millions of people working hard.

umvi 7y ago
> 50% of the patients in ICU are under 50 And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? When the mortality rate is 0.2% for people < 60 years old, I just have a hard time believing that it requires the response we've been giving it. I would bet that for healthy, non-vulnerable adults (i.e. they don't have a pre-existing condition that makes them extra susceptible) the death rate is virtually 0%. I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.
- MaybiusStrip 7y ago
  >And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days? This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance. > I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction. Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why? 1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis? 2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario. I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb https://twitter.com/nntaleb