8 ms·

It's worse than that. He's making a reasonable argument that the public will be put in the way of greater harm by letting the economy collapse. I'd find it pret

by sambe 7y ago

It's worse than that. He's making a reasonable argument that the public will be put in the way of greater harm by letting the economy collapse. I'd find it pretty hard to say whether he's right or wrong. However, even if you think he's wrong, this is not an argument being made in bad faith. Censorship is a simply bad way to handle it.

mantap 7y ago
Is it reasonable? In Italy and Spain they have so many bodies that they are running out of space to put them. These people are not dying of economic effects.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  It's really hard to get reliable data on that. EUROMOMO (the all-cause mortality monitoring that's been used for years for determining if influenza is causing more significantly mortality than baseline each season) doesn't show any significant spike in all-cause mortality in either country.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    So, if I'm interpreting the downvotes correctly: Newspapers with emotive articles about not having space for the bodies: reliable & obviously true European Union all-cause mortality monitoring data, used since 2009 and collected by ECDC/WHO/EUROSTAT/EISN: obviously incorrect Got it.
    - bad_user 7y ago
      Covid-2019 has made 35,000 victims globally, out of which 10,000 just in Italy, just in one month, victims happening in spite of massive movement restrictions happening on a never before seen scale and it's been pretty clear already that this isn't "just a flu". On the other hand the numbers are too small so they currently don't make a dent in the overall statistics, however this is a problem of potential and every single prediction thus far came true, with the news being all bad. The disease is scary not only due to mortality rate, but due to hospitalization rate too and in terms of hospitalization, there's not much difference between the young and healthy and the old or sick. When 10% of those infected require medical assistance, this will cripple your economy regardless of fatally. Plus if the medical system is collapsing, the median age will go down, since the young and healthy won't necessarily get the needed ICU beds. There's also the small matter of the population not having any immunity to this virus (compared with Influenza) which guarantees that if unchecked it will spread to 70% of the population at least. 70% spread, with a 0.5% mortality rate (an optimistic estimate) means 1,560,422 dead just in the EU and this in the ideal case in which everybody gets treated, otherwise that rate can easily be double or triple. Or 27,000,000 worldwide. Such a number is comparable with the victims of World War I. You're being down-voted because of downplaying the severity of this disease, when the writing is on the wall — the Italians downplayed this too and now their hospitals are overwhelmed. Of course, a discussion of where this is headed and what can we do to avoid a severe economic depression is worth having, but let's not downplay how bad this is.
      - _-___________-_ 7y ago
        Note that I never said this was "just a flu". The baseline mortality rate in Italy is about 50,000 deaths per month, and that's averaged over the year -- it's considerably higher from November to April. The concern should be about additional deaths, not the raw numbers of "how many people died after testing positive for Covid-19" -- which, it's worth noting, is the metric being measured here, not "deaths exclusively caused by Covid-19". We don't treat any other respiratory illness this way. If we applied the same logic to other respiratory illnesses (flu appears to be a trigger word these days, but it's the big one!) then a very large number of deaths we currently attribute to other things (cancer & heart disease to name two huge ones) would suddenly become "flu deaths". (edited: I had an extra zero on the baseline mortality rate due to a calculation error)
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        gadders 7y ago
        This is the same as in the UK currently. If you have, say, terminal cancer but it is a dose of flu that finally kills you, the death is recorded as due to cancer. If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1] "But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections. Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections." [1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19...
    - yread 7y ago
      Maybe you're getting downvoted because your own source advises against being used as a source for your argument? From euromomo: > Note concerning COVID-19 related mortality as part of the all-cause mortality figures reported by EuroMOMO > Over the past few days, the EuroMOMO hub has received many questions about the weekly all-cause mortality data and the possible contribution of any COVID-19 related mortality. Some wonder why no increased mortality is observed in the reported mortality figures for the COVID-19 affected countries. > The answer is that increased mortality that may occur primarily at subnational level or within smaller focal areas, and/or concentrated within smaller age groups, may not be detectable at the national level, even more so not in the pooled analysis at European level, given the large total population denominator. Furthermore, there is always a few weeks of delay in death registration and reporting. Hence, the EuroMOMO mortality figures for the most recent weeks must be interpreted with some caution. > Therefore, although increased mortality may not be immediately observable in the EuroMOMO figures, this does not mean that increased mortality does not occur in some areas or in some age groups, including mortality related to COVID-19. EDIT: you can even see COVID19 deaths btw - if you scroll down to Italy there is an uptick. If Lombardy was there separately the uptick would be even bigger - the disease kills almost 3 times the number of people who die on an average day
- bad_user 7y ago
  This is the short term effect. We need to worry about the long term too. We need to worry about an economic depression rivaling that of 1929, in which a lot of people will die of hunger. Yes people are dying and we should do everything possible to stop that. However I'm getting worried that there's no plan in place for how long this lasts or what happens afterwards. A possibility is that it's not possible to control this virus, without continuous restrictions on movement, until a vaccine is ready. We're talking about a 12 - 18 months timeframe. If we keep the current restrictions for more than 2 months, we are already fucked, let alone for 12 months. Purposefully slowing down the economy for 12 months would be a disaster. There's also a detail missed by the pro-economy camp of course: even if you relax restrictions, that doesn't mean we won't go through a severe economic recession, simply because people have already lost appetite for investing in useless shit they don't need, especially when other people are dying around them. This economic recession was inevitable, with or without restrictions. But we also need to ensure that people don't end up dying of hunger and that's a conversation worth having. It seems to me that politicians don't have a clue about what to do and were this is going and that's freaking scary.
  - lucian1900 7y ago
    There was plenty of food produced in the US during the Great Depression, it was even getting destroyed by producers in an effort to increase the price. Maybe instead of a market economy that arbitrarily starves people we should democratically and rationally plan production and distribution for the benefit of all.
    - aivisol 7y ago
      Do you know if there are any working examples of that in a history? The ones which work on a state level at least and are sustainable in a long term? And how would that be done democratically? Do you just vote for the expropriation and distribution of goods and property? I think I have seen it already...
      - lucian1900 7y ago
        Cuba is probably the best example. Despite decades under illegal embargo and starting off with extreme poverty and inequality, the material condition of the people has drastically improved. The people actually own most of the means of production and distribution through a different and more direct form of democracy. Beyond that, Cuba is the only environmentally sustainable country and exports medical care to the rest of the world.
- xenocratus 7y ago
  Italy and Spain are quite developed countries and part of one of the most prosperous economic blocs in the world. Of course people aren't dying of the economic effects, the state can support them through this. Do you think every country can just pull out trillions of dollars worth of support for their population when stuff like this happens?
  - mantap 7y ago
    What are you actually suggesting will happen? That there would be a major famine in Brazil? That Brazilians would freeze to death in the harsh Brazilian winter? How are these people going to die exactly?
choutos 7y ago
I just don't buy that argument of "let's let people die" to save the economy. That's evil.
- xenocratus 7y ago
  Even when not saving the economy leads to people dying? Not sure if this is free to read, but it offers some of the reasoning behind the difficulty of shutting down the economy in poorer countries: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/03/26/the-coronavirus-could-devastate-poor-countries https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/03/26/the-coronavirus... Short quote: "The worry, as Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister says, is that “if we shut down the cities...we will save [people] from corona at one end, but they will die from hunger.“"
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    According to this paper[1] public health interventions temporarily depress the economy but it quickly bounces back. OTOH widespread death due to choosing not to intervene depresses the economy for much longer. 1: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560
    - xenocratus 7y ago
      You're telling me that a paper about the outcome of something that happened 100 years ago in the US is valid for something happening now in Brazil (or other less developed countries)? From their Conclusion: "Finally, when interpreting our findings, there several important caveats to keep in mind. First, our analysis is limited to data on 30 states and 43 to 66 cities. Second, data on manufacturing activity is not available in all years, so we cannot carefully examine pre-trends between 1914 and 1919 for the manufacturing activity outcomes. Third, the economic environment toward the end of 1918 was unusual due to the end of WWI. Fourth, while there are important economic lessons from the 1918 Flu for today’s COVID- 19 pandemic, we stress the limits of external validity. Estimates suggest that 1918 Flu was more deadly than COVID-19, especially for prime-age workers, which also suggests more severe economic impacts of the 1918 Flu. The complex nature of modern global supply chains, the larger role of services, and improvements in communication technology are mechanisms we cannot capture in our analysis, but these are important factors for understanding the macroeconomic effects of COVID-19."
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
> He's making a reasonable argument that the public will be put in the way of greater harm best argument I have heard so far that counters this is from John Oliver last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElIf2DBrWzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElIf2DBrWzU
Kaze404 7y ago
One thing everyone seems to be missing in this thread is that these tweets aren't in isolation. Last week he came on national TV to beg people to go back to work, saying the virus is just "a little flu" and, while he's a senior citizen, he would be fine because of his "athletic history" (which is interesting, since he can't do a single push up). If you feel like the economy argument makes sense, fine, but let's not give this complete moron more credit than he's due.
ipython 7y ago
The truth is, the leaders who advocate for this approach aren’t doing this analysis. They’re just being lazy and hoping the problem goes away on its own. That works with a lot of “human” scale problems - however you can’t ignore exponential growth.
hsod 7y ago
ISIS recruiters and Nazi propagandists are not arguing in bad faith either-- is censorship a bad way to handle that? Where do you draw the line?

by sambe 7y ago

mantap 7y ago

Is it reasonable? In Italy and Spain they have so many bodies that they are running out of space to put them. These people are not dying of economic effects.

_-___________-_ 7y ago
It's really hard to get reliable data on that. EUROMOMO (the all-cause mortality monitoring that's been used for years for determining if influenza is causing more significantly mortality than baseline each season) doesn't show any significant spike in all-cause mortality in either country.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  So, if I'm interpreting the downvotes correctly: Newspapers with emotive articles about not having space for the bodies: reliable & obviously true European Union all-cause mortality monitoring data, used since 2009 and collected by ECDC/WHO/EUROSTAT/EISN: obviously incorrect Got it.
  - bad_user 7y ago
    Covid-2019 has made 35,000 victims globally, out of which 10,000 just in Italy, just in one month, victims happening in spite of massive movement restrictions happening on a never before seen scale and it's been pretty clear already that this isn't "just a flu". On the other hand the numbers are too small so they currently don't make a dent in the overall statistics, however this is a problem of potential and every single prediction thus far came true, with the news being all bad. The disease is scary not only due to mortality rate, but due to hospitalization rate too and in terms of hospitalization, there's not much difference between the young and healthy and the old or sick. When 10% of those infected require medical assistance, this will cripple your economy regardless of fatally. Plus if the medical system is collapsing, the median age will go down, since the young and healthy won't necessarily get the needed ICU beds. There's also the small matter of the population not having any immunity to this virus (compared with Influenza) which guarantees that if unchecked it will spread to 70% of the population at least. 70% spread, with a 0.5% mortality rate (an optimistic estimate) means 1,560,422 dead just in the EU and this in the ideal case in which everybody gets treated, otherwise that rate can easily be double or triple. Or 27,000,000 worldwide. Such a number is comparable with the victims of World War I. You're being down-voted because of downplaying the severity of this disease, when the writing is on the wall — the Italians downplayed this too and now their hospitals are overwhelmed. Of course, a discussion of where this is headed and what can we do to avoid a severe economic depression is worth having, but let's not downplay how bad this is.
    - _-___________-_ 7y ago
      Note that I never said this was "just a flu". The baseline mortality rate in Italy is about 50,000 deaths per month, and that's averaged over the year -- it's considerably higher from November to April. The concern should be about additional deaths, not the raw numbers of "how many people died after testing positive for Covid-19" -- which, it's worth noting, is the metric being measured here, not "deaths exclusively caused by Covid-19". We don't treat any other respiratory illness this way. If we applied the same logic to other respiratory illnesses (flu appears to be a trigger word these days, but it's the big one!) then a very large number of deaths we currently attribute to other things (cancer & heart disease to name two huge ones) would suddenly become "flu deaths". (edited: I had an extra zero on the baseline mortality rate due to a calculation error)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - gadders 7y ago
        This is the same as in the UK currently. If you have, say, terminal cancer but it is a dose of flu that finally kills you, the death is recorded as due to cancer. If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1] "But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections. Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections." [1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19...
  - yread 7y ago
    Maybe you're getting downvoted because your own source advises against being used as a source for your argument? From euromomo: > Note concerning COVID-19 related mortality as part of the all-cause mortality figures reported by EuroMOMO > Over the past few days, the EuroMOMO hub has received many questions about the weekly all-cause mortality data and the possible contribution of any COVID-19 related mortality. Some wonder why no increased mortality is observed in the reported mortality figures for the COVID-19 affected countries. > The answer is that increased mortality that may occur primarily at subnational level or within smaller focal areas, and/or concentrated within smaller age groups, may not be detectable at the national level, even more so not in the pooled analysis at European level, given the large total population denominator. Furthermore, there is always a few weeks of delay in death registration and reporting. Hence, the EuroMOMO mortality figures for the most recent weeks must be interpreted with some caution. > Therefore, although increased mortality may not be immediately observable in the EuroMOMO figures, this does not mean that increased mortality does not occur in some areas or in some age groups, including mortality related to COVID-19. EDIT: you can even see COVID19 deaths btw - if you scroll down to Italy there is an uptick. If Lombardy was there separately the uptick would be even bigger - the disease kills almost 3 times the number of people who die on an average day
bad_user 7y ago
This is the short term effect. We need to worry about the long term too. We need to worry about an economic depression rivaling that of 1929, in which a lot of people will die of hunger. Yes people are dying and we should do everything possible to stop that. However I'm getting worried that there's no plan in place for how long this lasts or what happens afterwards. A possibility is that it's not possible to control this virus, without continuous restrictions on movement, until a vaccine is ready. We're talking about a 12 - 18 months timeframe. If we keep the current restrictions for more than 2 months, we are already fucked, let alone for 12 months. Purposefully slowing down the economy for 12 months would be a disaster. There's also a detail missed by the pro-economy camp of course: even if you relax restrictions, that doesn't mean we won't go through a severe economic recession, simply because people have already lost appetite for investing in useless shit they don't need, especially when other people are dying around them. This economic recession was inevitable, with or without restrictions. But we also need to ensure that people don't end up dying of hunger and that's a conversation worth having. It seems to me that politicians don't have a clue about what to do and were this is going and that's freaking scary.
- lucian1900 7y ago
  There was plenty of food produced in the US during the Great Depression, it was even getting destroyed by producers in an effort to increase the price. Maybe instead of a market economy that arbitrarily starves people we should democratically and rationally plan production and distribution for the benefit of all.
  - aivisol 7y ago
    Do you know if there are any working examples of that in a history? The ones which work on a state level at least and are sustainable in a long term? And how would that be done democratically? Do you just vote for the expropriation and distribution of goods and property? I think I have seen it already...
    - lucian1900 7y ago
      Cuba is probably the best example. Despite decades under illegal embargo and starting off with extreme poverty and inequality, the material condition of the people has drastically improved. The people actually own most of the means of production and distribution through a different and more direct form of democracy. Beyond that, Cuba is the only environmentally sustainable country and exports medical care to the rest of the world.
xenocratus 7y ago
Italy and Spain are quite developed countries and part of one of the most prosperous economic blocs in the world. Of course people aren't dying of the economic effects, the state can support them through this. Do you think every country can just pull out trillions of dollars worth of support for their population when stuff like this happens?
- mantap 7y ago
  What are you actually suggesting will happen? That there would be a major famine in Brazil? That Brazilians would freeze to death in the harsh Brazilian winter? How are these people going to die exactly?

choutos 7y ago

I just don't buy that argument of "let's let people die" to save the economy. That's evil.

xenocratus 7y ago
Even when not saving the economy leads to people dying? Not sure if this is free to read, but it offers some of the reasoning behind the difficulty of shutting down the economy in poorer countries: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/03/26/the-coronavirus-could-devastate-poor-countries https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/03/26/the-coronavirus... Short quote: "The worry, as Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister says, is that “if we shut down the cities...we will save [people] from corona at one end, but they will die from hunger.“"
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  According to this paper[1] public health interventions temporarily depress the economy but it quickly bounces back. OTOH widespread death due to choosing not to intervene depresses the economy for much longer. 1: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560
  - xenocratus 7y ago
    You're telling me that a paper about the outcome of something that happened 100 years ago in the US is valid for something happening now in Brazil (or other less developed countries)? From their Conclusion: "Finally, when interpreting our findings, there several important caveats to keep in mind. First, our analysis is limited to data on 30 states and 43 to 66 cities. Second, data on manufacturing activity is not available in all years, so we cannot carefully examine pre-trends between 1914 and 1919 for the manufacturing activity outcomes. Third, the economic environment toward the end of 1918 was unusual due to the end of WWI. Fourth, while there are important economic lessons from the 1918 Flu for today’s COVID- 19 pandemic, we stress the limits of external validity. Estimates suggest that 1918 Flu was more deadly than COVID-19, especially for prime-age workers, which also suggests more severe economic impacts of the 1918 Flu. The complex nature of modern global supply chains, the larger role of services, and improvements in communication technology are mechanisms we cannot capture in our analysis, but these are important factors for understanding the macroeconomic effects of COVID-19."

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago

> He's making a reasonable argument that the public will be put in the way of greater harm best argument I have heard so far that counters this is from John Oliver last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElIf2DBrWzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElIf2DBrWzU

Kaze404 7y ago

One thing everyone seems to be missing in this thread is that these tweets aren't in isolation. Last week he came on national TV to beg people to go back to work, saying the virus is just "a little flu" and, while he's a senior citizen, he would be fine because of his "athletic history" (which is interesting, since he can't do a single push up). If you feel like the economy argument makes sense, fine, but let's not give this complete moron more credit than he's due.

ipython 7y ago

The truth is, the leaders who advocate for this approach aren’t doing this analysis. They’re just being lazy and hoping the problem goes away on its own. That works with a lot of “human” scale problems - however you can’t ignore exponential growth.

hsod 7y ago

ISIS recruiters and Nazi propagandists are not arguing in bad faith either-- is censorship a bad way to handle that? Where do you draw the line?