8 ms·

At what point does fallout from trying to avoid covid-19 deaths cause more deaths than covid-19. We're talking domestic violence, starvation abroad (due to loca

At what point does fallout from trying to avoid covid-19 deaths cause more deaths than covid-19. We're talking domestic violence, starvation abroad (due to local hoarding, which has begun), and actual crop failure (due to a shortage of transient labor). There's also suicide, depression, etc. I'm not even saying let up on all the social distancing measures. I think social distancing measures are good, but perhaps over the top. Nowhere have I seen a discussion of where to stop with the measures because of diminishing returns and increasingly negative economic (and indirect human life loss) impact.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I am sure a lot of politicians are struggling with this decision right now.
- threeseed 7y ago
  Not really. Consensus from almost all countries is that you need to quarantine and shut down the economy in order to beat this. Those that believed that they could get around this with herd immunity are either paying a huge price (UK) or about to (Sweden). And those politicians that took hard measures actually have been rewarded (Australia) and those that didn't punished (UK, US).
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    But when do you open up again? We can't keep the lockdown until there are no cases.
    - pmorici 7y ago
      If you use China as a guide they were shut for ~8 weeks and then opened up slowly over the course of a month.
  - logicchains 7y ago
    You conveniently ignore Korea and Taiwan, where the curve has been flattened without shutting down the economy or closing "non-essential" businesses.
    - javagram 7y ago
      Taiwan effectively stopped the virus at the border. They have only 380 cases and 5 deaths recorded total from the coronavirus. It’s too late now for countries that have allowed the coronavirus to run wild for months and spread throughout their society to emulate that. Vietnam is another success story as well I think - 255 cases, 0 deaths. This is definitely the ideal model to follow which is to prevent the disease from rooting itself within your borders, allowing the economy and society to continue as normal. Once you have wide-spread community transmission as Western countries do, emulating this approach becomes difficult... I believe the lockdowns are an attempt to effectively reset the state back to a lower number of active cases so that a South Korea style containment of the disease could be attempted.
  - nradov 7y ago
    We'll find out in a few weeks whether the herd immunity approach is effective by looking at what happens in the poorest countries. Some of them have minimal ability to lock down the economy or quarantine people due to lack of resources, dysfunctional healthcare systems, limited food reserves, and weak governments. So the virus is going to run its course regardless of what anyone wants. It's a tragic situation but there doesn't appear to be any alternative.
    - jobigoud 7y ago
      I think Iran was the first in this category.
      - nradov 7y ago
        Iran isn't particularly poor. Hardly anyone starves to death there. The real test will come when the virus hits places like refugee camps in Bangladesh.
lisper 7y ago
If you assume a mortality rate of 1% (which is probably in the ballpark) then you can expect 75 million deaths without intervention. So far world-wide we've had about 95,000 deaths. So doing nothing would result in about 700 times as many deaths as have occurred so far. I'd say it's probably to soon to throw in the towel.
- aianus 7y ago
  IMF says 500 million people worldwide who were out of poverty will or have returned to poverty because of the recession. IMF poverty line is < $1.90 a day so surely many of them will die from malnutrition or preventable disease as well. Edit: it was Oxfam that published the report to inform the IMF and World Bank at their meeting next week
  - secondo 7y ago
    IMF says 500 million people worldwide who were out of poverty will or have returned to poverty because of the recession. It's a relevant perspective, but I can't seem to find any source for IMF claiming that. Do you have one or are you referring to research publicized by Oxfam[1]? [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52211206 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52211206
    - aianus 7y ago
      You are correct, I apologize, it says that Oxfam published the report ahead of an upcoming IMF meeting.
- TechBro8615 7y ago
  This line of reasoning assumes that containment is feasible at this point. Is it? Or will everyone get the virus eventually? One ironic downside of “flattening the curve” is that it makes it longer. So, barring a vaccine or effective therapeutic treatment, we will all get the virus eventually (but in an orderly fashion, which is good for the health system), and that 75 million deaths will become a reality. Note that’s also assuming a 1% death rate which may be a vast overestimate depending on asymptomatic percentages. That said, I tend to agree with you that we should keep social distancing in place until we are able to contain new cases, or until we have a much better understanding of the virus itself. At this point there is just too much uncertainty, so it’s better to wait it out until we can establish some clarity and have a better idea of how to approach therapeutics.
redis_mlc 7y ago
It already happened. The West will be litigating unpaid rent, etc. for the next decade since there aren't enough court rooms. What we fundamentally got wrong is that ventilators don't work in 66% - 90% of cases, so "flattening the curve" was largely pointless and distracted leaders from low-tech solutions like quarantine centers and palliative care. We should have learned that in 2002 from SARS-1, but nobody even seems to remember it.
- jklein11 7y ago
  do you have sources for this >What we fundamentally got wrong is that ventilators don't work in 66% - 90% of cases
  - mrep 7y ago
    "The largest study so far to look at mortality among coronavirus patients on ventilators was done by the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre in London. It found that among 98 ventilated patients in the U.K., just 33 were discharged alive. The numbers from a study of Wuhan, China, are even grimmer. Only 3 of 22 ventilated patients survived" [0]. [0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/826105278/ventilators-are-no-panacea-for-critically-ill-covid-19-patients https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/8261052...
    - jmcgough 7y ago
      Cuomo has already said this iirc; most people who go on a ventilator don't come off of it alive. That doesn't make it pointless to even have ventilators though, a 40% survival rate is certainly better than a 0% survival rate for those who need a ventilator.
      - lazylizard 7y ago
        Do they die because or inspite of the ventilators?
        7y ago
sahil-kang 7y ago
Can you share sources/data showing some of the fallout from covid-19 mitigation efforts?
jdc 7y ago
I can't help but think we could close a lot less shops if everyone wore (even sub-N95) masks
- NomDePlum 7y ago
  So you want to speculate on this? All evidence is strongly against what you are proposing. It would without doubt lead to more deaths. Why would anyone even consider the course of action you are proposing? I've already had people close to me die. You should think some more and be able to provide a reasoned argument or be quiet until you can on this.
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    Taiwan seems to have done it. Compare NYC and Taipai public transit during virus it's stark: https://i.redd.it/ufezdm2hjul41.jpg https://i.redd.it/ufezdm2hjul41.jpg https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/commuter-mask-getty.jpg https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/commute...
    - NomDePlum 7y ago
      Citation please. That has certainly not been true of China, S.Korea, NZ, Germany, Australia or other countries that have successfully followed a suppression strategy.
      - hnaccy 7y ago
        Citation for what? Taiwan has similar population as Australia, is higher density than Sydney AUS, and has a fraction of the cases and deaths. They didn't close everything down they did targeted tracking/testing and isolation of individuals, mandatory masks on transit, fever checks in public etc.
        NomDePlum 7y ago
        Ok, so not just masks. I don't know Taiwan's details but it sounds like they followed a test and trace strategy which is vastly different. Thanks for clarifying.
birken 7y ago
If you just let the virus run its course you would have so many extremely sick people at once that it would overrun the health care systems in every country. Many more people than just COVID patients would die, and the death rate of COVID patients would go way up due to inadequate care. The fallout from letting the virus run its course is way beyond taking the current rates and extrapolating to the entire worldwide population.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Everyone who poses this question can’t seem to fathom that they’re arguing against something that can’t be undone. It’s not lockdown vs. reopening in terms of damage, but a competent, thorough response when this first emerged vs. mitigating the deaths and injuries from not having acted appropriately at the outset.
ajross 7y ago
Your question presumes that if we stop "trying to avoid covid-19 deaths" that we'll experience what we're seeing now. We won't. US case load stopped growing about 5 days ago because of the mitigation effort. Prior to that, it was doubling every 3-4 days. So just in the immediately verifiable present, there are 2-3 thousand people alive today in the US who wouldn't have been had we not locked down. That's just today. Let the virus run rampant and you get to the doomsday scenarios that everyone likes to scream about. The point is that the mitigations are working, and because they are working we have a good measure of how much worse the pandemic could be. And it could be really, really bad. If you have a better plan, it needs to be proposed and justified. But "let's not do this because of other causes of death" doesn't work, numerically.
visava 7y ago
Time to look at out of the box solutions https://www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/coronavirus.txt.pdf https://www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
- threeseed 7y ago
  I really wish people who followed this sort of thing actually had some integrity and honesty. And by that I mean when they do have an illness or disease that they don't resort to "Western medicine" and instead relied on Gaia to get them through it. At least then the problem would sort itself out.
DVassallo 7y ago
Covid-19 has a non-negligible chance of killing a billion people. When there's risk of ruin, cost-benefit analysis doesn't make sense anymore. (Russian roulette is never worth playing, regardless of the payoff.) Our actions to avoid covid-19 need to be judged on what could happen, not on what actually happens. You get it wrong once, and we disappear.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  It’s has a fatality rate of 1/7? Be reasonable man.
  - herval 7y ago
    If untreated, the fatality rate goes up. I imagine OPs figure is assuming widespread contagion and the average 20% hospitalization needed, which would translate to A LOT more dead people. We won’t know the actual death rate after the fact, of course, or how it compares in places where health care is saturated vs not. But that figure isn’t/wasn’t entirely impossible?
  - DVassallo 7y ago
    1. 20% require hospitalization. Hospital capacity is limited. 2. It's questionable whether we can become immune to it. We might keep getting re-infected. 3. It causes permanent lung damage in some patients. Makes re-infection even more lethal. 4. There's a chance that animals can catch it and become a reservoir for it. Imagine if every dog, cat, and pigeon in the world is infected with it, but doesn't die from it. Yes, it's low probability. But it's not zero. And it's not negligible either.
pmorici 7y ago
No one I've seen make this argument seems to have any numbers to back up the "the cure is worse than the disease" argument. The do nothing case is pretty clear 1-2% of the Global population dies. Probably more because once the healthcare system is overwhelmed that percentage goes up.
- dingaling 7y ago
  > The do nothing case is pretty clear 1-2% of the Global population dies. And the population of the Earth could handle that without a blip, particularly as it is concentrated in the groups with the least economic contribution.
  - genofon 7y ago
    life is much more than just an economic contribution. Society is made by people that have relationships far beyond economics (family, friends..). Money plays a big part of course but people were also happy when there was less money around. Loosing one (or more) dear one is much more devastating that an economic crisis.
  - pmorici 7y ago
    Sure I guess if you think you are in the group that won't be affected that is easy to say. If you wanted to be really crass you might say that since it has a much higher mortality rate among older people it will be a huge boon for government's fiscal position because it will cull the rolls of Social Security beneficiaries.
- chronofar 7y ago
  Part of this argument, for me at least, isn't number based. I'm of the opinion that culturally we put far too much value on being alive and far too little on quality of life. You can see it in our conversation (here most people just want to talk about death numbers), our laws (ie euthanasia is illegal), and our news cycles. Everyone dies. All of humanity does not exist for most of the age of the universe, to say nothing of individuals. That's a trite thing to say but it is no less true. Not everyone gets to live a good life, even fewer in situations like this. Our DNA wants to stay alive, the existential dread is understandable, but culturally I think we'd be a lot healthier if we put more value in quality of lives than the preservation of them. Now balancing this is not easy and I'm not saying in our current situation we should just lift all measures, but if framed that way the conversation starts to take on a different tone than just looking at potential death rates as the overall guiding function.
herval 7y ago
There’s evidence the lockdowns are actually REDUCING other deaths, such as from car accidents, air pollution or violent crimes: https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities/490601-amid-coronavirus-lockdowns-traffic-accidents-in https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities... https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/03/15/2024248/will-coronavirus-lockdowns-bring-a-drop-in-air-pollution-related-deaths https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/03/15/2024248/will-corona...
- lostlogin 7y ago
  I wonder how that works? Those at risk of death from air pollution are surely in a risk group that wouldn’t do well with covid.
  - herval 7y ago
    Without a lockdown, I imagine asthmatics and the like would be dying A LOT more
option 7y ago
I think we should also view lockdown costs in life time lost. Hundreds of millions of people now lost a month or more of their lives
- Exmoor 7y ago
  I did the math on this a few weeks ago because I was curious. My math was this: (Population x A) / (LifeExpectancyInYears x 365.25) A is an unknown variable that equals the what amount of a day people consider as "lost" as a result of mandated lockdown. IE, if everyone considers each day they spend not able to go about their business as a day of their life completely lost than A would equal 1. I suppose some people could consider the cost of a day lost to mandated quarantine as greater than 1. Anyway, by my calculations based on a US life expectancy of 77.5yrs (28,287.5 days) and a US population of 330 million then that puts the lifetimes lost per day at 11,666. Note, that's lifetimes lost. IE, as if 11,666 babies were born each day, but instead of living the their full life expectancy they all immediately died. edit: Markdown ate my asterisk symbol and \ doesn't work as an escape character apparently? Changed asterisks to x and the x variable to A.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Well, I don't know. I can't go eat out. I can't get together with friends, but I can call them. I can't play pickup games of ultimate frisbee. I can't go into the office. But I get to hang out with my wife and daughter. (I think that's great, but my wife is less enthusiastic.) I'm getting some things done around the house. I can still take the dog for a walk - I just avoid anyone else who's also out walking. I'm doing somewhat less of what I want, but I wouldn't regard it as "losing a month of my life". I don't like playing ultimate that much.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  Life time lost? If you can't work remotely just pick up some indoor hobbies. Learn Spanish or French, learn to play guitar, experiment with electronics, contribute to an open source software, or teach something you know to someone else over video. Life doesn't stop as long as we have bandwith.
smoovb 7y ago
Covid-19 fallout is also saving lives with regards to traffic deaths and air pollution.
II2II 7y ago
My main concern is: will we actually learn anything from this experience? We have had a couple of small scale trial runs over the past two decades. We got through those fine, but never considered what would happen if the spread got out of hand. I'm not going to pretend to be innocent here. It doesn't take an expert in infectious diseases or economics to at least prepare themselves and their family. There are also decisions that we make collectively, though not institutionally, that are dubious. Some people are lucky in that their role in society is important enough that they are valuable in this crisis. Others will more-or-less have their value to society restored as soon as this is over. Then there are the people who's social value depends upon economic prosperity. Those people are going to be hit the hardest. Then there are the institutional decisions. Some of those are the craziest. Organizations to handle domestic violence, homelessness, mental illness, etc. were scraping by in good times. Transient labor is not an issue in itself, reliance upon it is. While I'm guessing that your reference to transient labor refers to seasonal foreign workers from the context, something similar has been created in local job markets. Many people are working several jobs simply to make ends meet. They cannot provide their own safety net in the case of any crisis (personal, national, or global). In the worse of cases, they are providing a vector for the spread of disease (e.g. hospital and nursing home employees working at several facilities). On top of all of that, we have the government. I'm not talking about politicians here. They are certainly part of the problem when the don't listen to their own experts, undermine them, or simply get rid of those they don't agree with. I am talking about the civil service. These are the people who provide continuity and should be doing comprehensive planning for different scenarios. (Not to mention ensuring that government services can handle emergencies.) What I have been seeing are a slew of half baked solutions that reflect politician's distorted world view that are, at best, addressed after reality is exposed to them. My apologies for the rant. Part of the reason for it is that I think the wealthier nations will pull through this, but we could have done a lot better if we went into it prepared.
fyfy18 7y ago
> starvation abroad (due to local hoarding, which has begun) Is there any evidence that this could happen? I live in a small Northern European country and there have been absolutely no shortages of TP or food items here. Even at peak toilet paper demand, when I went to the supermarket one brand was sold out, but there were plenty of other brands available - the same happens if they have a promotion, so maybe it was just a coincidence. It seems that most of these issues are caused by supply chain problems, not a lack of available food, and the bigger a country, the harder the impact is felt. A lot of the common produce items are grown locally, it's mostly out-of-season (tomatoes) and more exotic fruits (mandarins, avocados) that are shipped from the other side of Europe or Africa. Almost all meat, dairy and grain items are produced locally. If we were only able to eat food grown within our country, I don't think we would be faced with mass starvation.
- nradov 7y ago
  Any evidence? People were already starving in poor countries. Imposing lockdown measures makes the hunger situation worse. If you don't have food today then dying of an infection next week is the least of your concerns. https://www.concernusa.org/story/worlds-ten-hungriest-countries/ https://www.concernusa.org/story/worlds-ten-hungriest-countr... Industrialized countries will have sufficient food for a while, but if major sectors of the economy are shut down for months then supply chains will break down and we'll start to see empty grocery shelves.
hkai 7y ago
A quick Google search shows that the 2008 crisis caused 500k extra deaths due to cancer alone due to lack of funds to treat it. That really shows you the scale. Also some studies from Africa showed that economic downturns reliably predict wars.
- lordlimecat 7y ago
  500k extra, or early deaths? I can't imagine that 500k people got cancer from 2008, and if they had cancer they may have already been approaching death. Numbers like that seem extremely suspect because they can be spun however you like by assuming how things would have been.
tim333 7y ago
I've seen some discussion. Bill Gates was talking about steps to end the lockdown yesterday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKg40HX6oUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKg40HX6oUo eg. Restarting factory production probably worth it soon, large sports events not. A big problem with this is there are so many unknowns - will there be effective treatment, a vaccine and so on.
swsieber 7y ago
There's all this talk of "this is what the virus unchecked leads to, so we can't let up". I'm not suggesting we throw up our hands and attend tightly packed concerts. I'm suggesting we stop pushing for an R value of 0, and instead deliberate what the least costly options are (both economicly and in human life) keeping the R value under 1. We might not be conciously pushing for an R value of 0, but it appears that way.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I am sure a lot of politicians are struggling with this decision right now.

threeseed 7y ago
Not really. Consensus from almost all countries is that you need to quarantine and shut down the economy in order to beat this. Those that believed that they could get around this with herd immunity are either paying a huge price (UK) or about to (Sweden). And those politicians that took hard measures actually have been rewarded (Australia) and those that didn't punished (UK, US).
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  But when do you open up again? We can't keep the lockdown until there are no cases.
  - pmorici 7y ago
    If you use China as a guide they were shut for ~8 weeks and then opened up slowly over the course of a month.
- logicchains 7y ago
  You conveniently ignore Korea and Taiwan, where the curve has been flattened without shutting down the economy or closing "non-essential" businesses.
  - javagram 7y ago
    Taiwan effectively stopped the virus at the border. They have only 380 cases and 5 deaths recorded total from the coronavirus. It’s too late now for countries that have allowed the coronavirus to run wild for months and spread throughout their society to emulate that. Vietnam is another success story as well I think - 255 cases, 0 deaths. This is definitely the ideal model to follow which is to prevent the disease from rooting itself within your borders, allowing the economy and society to continue as normal. Once you have wide-spread community transmission as Western countries do, emulating this approach becomes difficult... I believe the lockdowns are an attempt to effectively reset the state back to a lower number of active cases so that a South Korea style containment of the disease could be attempted.
- nradov 7y ago
  We'll find out in a few weeks whether the herd immunity approach is effective by looking at what happens in the poorest countries. Some of them have minimal ability to lock down the economy or quarantine people due to lack of resources, dysfunctional healthcare systems, limited food reserves, and weak governments. So the virus is going to run its course regardless of what anyone wants. It's a tragic situation but there doesn't appear to be any alternative.
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    I think Iran was the first in this category.
    - nradov 7y ago
      Iran isn't particularly poor. Hardly anyone starves to death there. The real test will come when the virus hits places like refugee camps in Bangladesh.

lisper 7y ago

If you assume a mortality rate of 1% (which is probably in the ballpark) then you can expect 75 million deaths without intervention. So far world-wide we've had about 95,000 deaths. So doing nothing would result in about 700 times as many deaths as have occurred so far. I'd say it's probably to soon to throw in the towel.

aianus 7y ago
IMF says 500 million people worldwide who were out of poverty will or have returned to poverty because of the recession. IMF poverty line is < $1.90 a day so surely many of them will die from malnutrition or preventable disease as well. Edit: it was Oxfam that published the report to inform the IMF and World Bank at their meeting next week
- secondo 7y ago
  IMF says 500 million people worldwide who were out of poverty will or have returned to poverty because of the recession. It's a relevant perspective, but I can't seem to find any source for IMF claiming that. Do you have one or are you referring to research publicized by Oxfam[1]? [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52211206 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52211206
  - aianus 7y ago
    You are correct, I apologize, it says that Oxfam published the report ahead of an upcoming IMF meeting.
TechBro8615 7y ago
This line of reasoning assumes that containment is feasible at this point. Is it? Or will everyone get the virus eventually? One ironic downside of “flattening the curve” is that it makes it longer. So, barring a vaccine or effective therapeutic treatment, we will all get the virus eventually (but in an orderly fashion, which is good for the health system), and that 75 million deaths will become a reality. Note that’s also assuming a 1% death rate which may be a vast overestimate depending on asymptomatic percentages. That said, I tend to agree with you that we should keep social distancing in place until we are able to contain new cases, or until we have a much better understanding of the virus itself. At this point there is just too much uncertainty, so it’s better to wait it out until we can establish some clarity and have a better idea of how to approach therapeutics.

redis_mlc 7y ago

It already happened. The West will be litigating unpaid rent, etc. for the next decade since there aren't enough court rooms. What we fundamentally got wrong is that ventilators don't work in 66% - 90% of cases, so "flattening the curve" was largely pointless and distracted leaders from low-tech solutions like quarantine centers and palliative care. We should have learned that in 2002 from SARS-1, but nobody even seems to remember it.

jklein11 7y ago
do you have sources for this >What we fundamentally got wrong is that ventilators don't work in 66% - 90% of cases
- mrep 7y ago
  "The largest study so far to look at mortality among coronavirus patients on ventilators was done by the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre in London. It found that among 98 ventilated patients in the U.K., just 33 were discharged alive. The numbers from a study of Wuhan, China, are even grimmer. Only 3 of 22 ventilated patients survived" [0]. [0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/826105278/ventilators-are-no-panacea-for-critically-ill-covid-19-patients https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/8261052...
  - jmcgough 7y ago
    Cuomo has already said this iirc; most people who go on a ventilator don't come off of it alive. That doesn't make it pointless to even have ventilators though, a 40% survival rate is certainly better than a 0% survival rate for those who need a ventilator.
    - lazylizard 7y ago
      Do they die because or inspite of the ventilators?
      - 7y ago

sahil-kang 7y ago

Can you share sources/data showing some of the fallout from covid-19 mitigation efforts?

jdc 7y ago

I can't help but think we could close a lot less shops if everyone wore (even sub-N95) masks

NomDePlum 7y ago
So you want to speculate on this? All evidence is strongly against what you are proposing. It would without doubt lead to more deaths. Why would anyone even consider the course of action you are proposing? I've already had people close to me die. You should think some more and be able to provide a reasoned argument or be quiet until you can on this.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  Taiwan seems to have done it. Compare NYC and Taipai public transit during virus it's stark: https://i.redd.it/ufezdm2hjul41.jpg https://i.redd.it/ufezdm2hjul41.jpg https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/commuter-mask-getty.jpg https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/commute...
  - NomDePlum 7y ago
    Citation please. That has certainly not been true of China, S.Korea, NZ, Germany, Australia or other countries that have successfully followed a suppression strategy.
    - hnaccy 7y ago
      Citation for what? Taiwan has similar population as Australia, is higher density than Sydney AUS, and has a fraction of the cases and deaths. They didn't close everything down they did targeted tracking/testing and isolation of individuals, mandatory masks on transit, fever checks in public etc.
      - NomDePlum 7y ago
        Ok, so not just masks. I don't know Taiwan's details but it sounds like they followed a test and trace strategy which is vastly different. Thanks for clarifying.

birken 7y ago

If you just let the virus run its course you would have so many extremely sick people at once that it would overrun the health care systems in every country. Many more people than just COVID patients would die, and the death rate of COVID patients would go way up due to inadequate care. The fallout from letting the virus run its course is way beyond taking the current rates and extrapolating to the entire worldwide population.

claudeganon 7y ago
Everyone who poses this question can’t seem to fathom that they’re arguing against something that can’t be undone. It’s not lockdown vs. reopening in terms of damage, but a competent, thorough response when this first emerged vs. mitigating the deaths and injuries from not having acted appropriately at the outset.

ajross 7y ago

Your question presumes that if we stop "trying to avoid covid-19 deaths" that we'll experience what we're seeing now. We won't. US case load stopped growing about 5 days ago because of the mitigation effort. Prior to that, it was doubling every 3-4 days. So just in the immediately verifiable present, there are 2-3 thousand people alive today in the US who wouldn't have been had we not locked down. That's just today. Let the virus run rampant and you get to the doomsday scenarios that everyone likes to scream about. The point is that the mitigations are working, and because they are working we have a good measure of how much worse the pandemic could be. And it could be really, really bad. If you have a better plan, it needs to be proposed and justified. But "let's not do this because of other causes of death" doesn't work, numerically.

visava 7y ago

Time to look at out of the box solutions https://www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/coronavirus.txt.pdf https://www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...

threeseed 7y ago
I really wish people who followed this sort of thing actually had some integrity and honesty. And by that I mean when they do have an illness or disease that they don't resort to "Western medicine" and instead relied on Gaia to get them through it. At least then the problem would sort itself out.

DVassallo 7y ago

Covid-19 has a non-negligible chance of killing a billion people. When there's risk of ruin, cost-benefit analysis doesn't make sense anymore. (Russian roulette is never worth playing, regardless of the payoff.) Our actions to avoid covid-19 need to be judged on what could happen, not on what actually happens. You get it wrong once, and we disappear.

mrfusion 7y ago
It’s has a fatality rate of 1/7? Be reasonable man.
- herval 7y ago
  If untreated, the fatality rate goes up. I imagine OPs figure is assuming widespread contagion and the average 20% hospitalization needed, which would translate to A LOT more dead people. We won’t know the actual death rate after the fact, of course, or how it compares in places where health care is saturated vs not. But that figure isn’t/wasn’t entirely impossible?
- DVassallo 7y ago
  1. 20% require hospitalization. Hospital capacity is limited. 2. It's questionable whether we can become immune to it. We might keep getting re-infected. 3. It causes permanent lung damage in some patients. Makes re-infection even more lethal. 4. There's a chance that animals can catch it and become a reservoir for it. Imagine if every dog, cat, and pigeon in the world is infected with it, but doesn't die from it. Yes, it's low probability. But it's not zero. And it's not negligible either.

pmorici 7y ago

No one I've seen make this argument seems to have any numbers to back up the "the cure is worse than the disease" argument. The do nothing case is pretty clear 1-2% of the Global population dies. Probably more because once the healthcare system is overwhelmed that percentage goes up.

dingaling 7y ago
> The do nothing case is pretty clear 1-2% of the Global population dies. And the population of the Earth could handle that without a blip, particularly as it is concentrated in the groups with the least economic contribution.
- genofon 7y ago
  life is much more than just an economic contribution. Society is made by people that have relationships far beyond economics (family, friends..). Money plays a big part of course but people were also happy when there was less money around. Loosing one (or more) dear one is much more devastating that an economic crisis.
- pmorici 7y ago
  Sure I guess if you think you are in the group that won't be affected that is easy to say. If you wanted to be really crass you might say that since it has a much higher mortality rate among older people it will be a huge boon for government's fiscal position because it will cull the rolls of Social Security beneficiaries.
chronofar 7y ago
Part of this argument, for me at least, isn't number based. I'm of the opinion that culturally we put far too much value on being alive and far too little on quality of life. You can see it in our conversation (here most people just want to talk about death numbers), our laws (ie euthanasia is illegal), and our news cycles. Everyone dies. All of humanity does not exist for most of the age of the universe, to say nothing of individuals. That's a trite thing to say but it is no less true. Not everyone gets to live a good life, even fewer in situations like this. Our DNA wants to stay alive, the existential dread is understandable, but culturally I think we'd be a lot healthier if we put more value in quality of lives than the preservation of them. Now balancing this is not easy and I'm not saying in our current situation we should just lift all measures, but if framed that way the conversation starts to take on a different tone than just looking at potential death rates as the overall guiding function.

herval 7y ago

There’s evidence the lockdowns are actually REDUCING other deaths, such as from car accidents, air pollution or violent crimes: https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities/490601-amid-coronavirus-lockdowns-traffic-accidents-in https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities... https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/03/15/2024248/will-coronavirus-lockdowns-bring-a-drop-in-air-pollution-related-deaths https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/03/15/2024248/will-corona...

lostlogin 7y ago
I wonder how that works? Those at risk of death from air pollution are surely in a risk group that wouldn’t do well with covid.
- herval 7y ago
  Without a lockdown, I imagine asthmatics and the like would be dying A LOT more

option 7y ago

I think we should also view lockdown costs in life time lost. Hundreds of millions of people now lost a month or more of their lives

Exmoor 7y ago
I did the math on this a few weeks ago because I was curious. My math was this: (Population x A) / (LifeExpectancyInYears x 365.25) A is an unknown variable that equals the what amount of a day people consider as "lost" as a result of mandated lockdown. IE, if everyone considers each day they spend not able to go about their business as a day of their life completely lost than A would equal 1. I suppose some people could consider the cost of a day lost to mandated quarantine as greater than 1. Anyway, by my calculations based on a US life expectancy of 77.5yrs (28,287.5 days) and a US population of 330 million then that puts the lifetimes lost per day at 11,666. Note, that's lifetimes lost. IE, as if 11,666 babies were born each day, but instead of living the their full life expectancy they all immediately died. edit: Markdown ate my asterisk symbol and \ doesn't work as an escape character apparently? Changed asterisks to x and the x variable to A.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Well, I don't know. I can't go eat out. I can't get together with friends, but I can call them. I can't play pickup games of ultimate frisbee. I can't go into the office. But I get to hang out with my wife and daughter. (I think that's great, but my wife is less enthusiastic.) I'm getting some things done around the house. I can still take the dog for a walk - I just avoid anyone else who's also out walking. I'm doing somewhat less of what I want, but I wouldn't regard it as "losing a month of my life". I don't like playing ultimate that much.
jobigoud 7y ago
Life time lost? If you can't work remotely just pick up some indoor hobbies. Learn Spanish or French, learn to play guitar, experiment with electronics, contribute to an open source software, or teach something you know to someone else over video. Life doesn't stop as long as we have bandwith.

smoovb 7y ago

Covid-19 fallout is also saving lives with regards to traffic deaths and air pollution.

II2II 7y ago

My main concern is: will we actually learn anything from this experience? We have had a couple of small scale trial runs over the past two decades. We got through those fine, but never considered what would happen if the spread got out of hand. I'm not going to pretend to be innocent here. It doesn't take an expert in infectious diseases or economics to at least prepare themselves and their family. There are also decisions that we make collectively, though not institutionally, that are dubious. Some people are lucky in that their role in society is important enough that they are valuable in this crisis. Others will more-or-less have their value to society restored as soon as this is over. Then there are the people who's social value depends upon economic prosperity. Those people are going to be hit the hardest. Then there are the institutional decisions. Some of those are the craziest. Organizations to handle domestic violence, homelessness, mental illness, etc. were scraping by in good times. Transient labor is not an issue in itself, reliance upon it is. While I'm guessing that your reference to transient labor refers to seasonal foreign workers from the context, something similar has been created in local job markets. Many people are working several jobs simply to make ends meet. They cannot provide their own safety net in the case of any crisis (personal, national, or global). In the worse of cases, they are providing a vector for the spread of disease (e.g. hospital and nursing home employees working at several facilities). On top of all of that, we have the government. I'm not talking about politicians here. They are certainly part of the problem when the don't listen to their own experts, undermine them, or simply get rid of those they don't agree with. I am talking about the civil service. These are the people who provide continuity and should be doing comprehensive planning for different scenarios. (Not to mention ensuring that government services can handle emergencies.) What I have been seeing are a slew of half baked solutions that reflect politician's distorted world view that are, at best, addressed after reality is exposed to them. My apologies for the rant. Part of the reason for it is that I think the wealthier nations will pull through this, but we could have done a lot better if we went into it prepared.

fyfy18 7y ago

> starvation abroad (due to local hoarding, which has begun) Is there any evidence that this could happen? I live in a small Northern European country and there have been absolutely no shortages of TP or food items here. Even at peak toilet paper demand, when I went to the supermarket one brand was sold out, but there were plenty of other brands available - the same happens if they have a promotion, so maybe it was just a coincidence. It seems that most of these issues are caused by supply chain problems, not a lack of available food, and the bigger a country, the harder the impact is felt. A lot of the common produce items are grown locally, it's mostly out-of-season (tomatoes) and more exotic fruits (mandarins, avocados) that are shipped from the other side of Europe or Africa. Almost all meat, dairy and grain items are produced locally. If we were only able to eat food grown within our country, I don't think we would be faced with mass starvation.

nradov 7y ago
Any evidence? People were already starving in poor countries. Imposing lockdown measures makes the hunger situation worse. If you don't have food today then dying of an infection next week is the least of your concerns. https://www.concernusa.org/story/worlds-ten-hungriest-countries/ https://www.concernusa.org/story/worlds-ten-hungriest-countr... Industrialized countries will have sufficient food for a while, but if major sectors of the economy are shut down for months then supply chains will break down and we'll start to see empty grocery shelves.

hkai 7y ago

A quick Google search shows that the 2008 crisis caused 500k extra deaths due to cancer alone due to lack of funds to treat it. That really shows you the scale. Also some studies from Africa showed that economic downturns reliably predict wars.

lordlimecat 7y ago
500k extra, or early deaths? I can't imagine that 500k people got cancer from 2008, and if they had cancer they may have already been approaching death. Numbers like that seem extremely suspect because they can be spun however you like by assuming how things would have been.

tim333 7y ago

I've seen some discussion. Bill Gates was talking about steps to end the lockdown yesterday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKg40HX6oUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKg40HX6oUo eg. Restarting factory production probably worth it soon, large sports events not. A big problem with this is there are so many unknowns - will there be effective treatment, a vaccine and so on.

swsieber 7y ago

There's all this talk of "this is what the virus unchecked leads to, so we can't let up". I'm not suggesting we throw up our hands and attend tightly packed concerts. I'm suggesting we stop pushing for an R value of 0, and instead deliberate what the least costly options are (both economicly and in human life) keeping the R value under 1. We might not be conciously pushing for an R value of 0, but it appears that way.