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A completely collapsed economy could trigger a society breakdown and will have deadly consequences as well, like violence (fighting over food, possesions) and b

• greedo 7y ago
  True. But imagine a more realistic scenario based on the CFR we've seen worldwide. Start with 7B people. Assume 50% get infected because we don't want to do a lockdown. 3.5B infections means 630M multi-week hospitalizations and 70M fatalities worldwide. And the follow-on effects will kill even more since these hospitalization rates will consume all our medical resources, so other illnesses will have higher CFRs as well. I don't know about you, but avoiding 70m fatalities and over 600M hospitalizations is the optimal choice. Pursuing this choice would be the greatest human calamity, surpassing the destruction of WW2 in terms of lives.
  • tunesmith 7y ago
    Is there a way to derive infection rate from the R0 value? Because we don't even get close to 50% infection with the flu, and covid's R0 isn't like measles or anything.
    • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      There's no way to derive infection rate at all, unfortunately. Even for pandemics in the past, where we can go back and look at all the epidemological data, estimates of infection rates tend to vary by at least 10 percentage points.
    • greedo 7y ago
      We don't really have an accurate infection rate from the flu since we don't test for it. Most of the flu data is collected via surveys...
    • DanBC 7y ago
      Don't forget we have massive campaigns to immunise against flu.