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Again, people keep talking about millions of people dying. The current US death projection is 60,000. Let me put this in context for you: 600,000 people die eac

Again, people keep talking about millions of people dying. The current US death projection is 60,000. Let me put this in context for you: 600,000 people die each year due to cancer. ~30,000 due to car crashes. Additional mortality amounting to one tenth as many people dying from cancer is not going to crash an economy. Both you and the other respondent are multiple orders of magnitude off in terms of your projected death rates for this virus. The idea that the economy would collapse due to the amount of people dying of coronavirus does not hold water. Even if widespread infection did occur, the mortality rate among working age people is well below 1%.

CydeWeys 7y ago
The current US death projection is 60,000 precisely because the strict social distancing is working. You sound like an anti-vaxer, arguing that measles isn't that bad and that the vaccine isn't necessary, when the vaccine is precisely the reason in the first place that measles isn't that bad! You can't argue against measure X by using the successful results of X to say that X didn't work in the first place!
- manfredo 7y ago
  Unlike a vaccine, social distancing likely won't reduce the total of people that will get infected. Social distancing also doesn't increase your chances of surviving an infection. It is useful in reducing the rate of transmission, so it slows down infections rather than immunizing people against them. Trying to equate opposition to social distancing to denying the effectiveness of vaccines so so overly simplistic that I have a hard time it was written in good faith. And right that the question is to compare the actual death toll to the death toll that would have happened without social distancing. Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). That's 250,000 additional deaths. That would be $100M per death averted assuming a $2.5T cost of the social distancing measures - that's ~10% of GDP. The US so far is expecting losses about twice that.
  - nullc 7y ago
    > social distancing likely won't reduce the total of people that will get infected. Social distancing also doesn't increase your chances of surviving an infection. There is substantial evidence for other viral infections that infection severity (spanning from asymptomatic to dead) is related to dosage. There is limited information so far for covid19 but some informal evidence that this is true for it too: Young healthcare workers appear to be dying a a much higher rate than similarly healthy members of the public who are sars-cov-2 positive. If this is the case, social distancing will reduce the number of people who get serious infections and reduce the number who die. Even if not, preventing overload of the hospitals will significantly reduce the number who die. Delaying infections until we better know how to treat the disease from anti-virals to simply care techniques will almost certantly reduce the number who die. > Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). T CDC's projection was 1.7 million dead before accounting for hospital overload.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      These early predictions were based inflated fatality rates. Early on, testing was only done on sick patients. People who contract the virus and don't get sick or don't get sick enough to go to the hospital aren't counted. So this is a huge selection bias. You didn't bother to cite where you're getting this figure, but it looks like this projection dates back to March 13 [1] or earlier. If you have a study that projects what the fatalities would have been with a shorter isolation period (e.g. only march and first two weeks of April), that would be noteworthy. Pointing to this early CDC study as a figure for what would have transpired had the economy not been shut down is not sound. 1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coronavirus-model-210m-infected-1-7m-dead.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coro...
      - nullc 7y ago
        > These early predictions were based inflated fatality rates. Not so, for example the mortalities from the diamond princess are _higher_ than the ones being used to drive those projections. The fact that it takes time for people to die has held down the estimated mortality during exponential case growth.
nullc 7y ago
The projections without measures were well over a million dead and those projections did not consider the additional deaths of non-covid19 persons due to overloaded hospitals.
- manfredo 7y ago
  These projections were based on fatality rates well above what is actually being observed by countries conducting random testing. We're talking about an order of magnitude off.

CydeWeys 7y ago

The current US death projection is 60,000 precisely because the strict social distancing is working. You sound like an anti-vaxer, arguing that measles isn't that bad and that the vaccine isn't necessary, when the vaccine is precisely the reason in the first place that measles isn't that bad! You can't argue against measure X by using the successful results of X to say that X didn't work in the first place!

manfredo 7y ago
Unlike a vaccine, social distancing likely won't reduce the total of people that will get infected. Social distancing also doesn't increase your chances of surviving an infection. It is useful in reducing the rate of transmission, so it slows down infections rather than immunizing people against them. Trying to equate opposition to social distancing to denying the effectiveness of vaccines so so overly simplistic that I have a hard time it was written in good faith. And right that the question is to compare the actual death toll to the death toll that would have happened without social distancing. Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). That's 250,000 additional deaths. That would be $100M per death averted assuming a $2.5T cost of the social distancing measures - that's ~10% of GDP. The US so far is expecting losses about twice that.
- nullc 7y ago
  > social distancing likely won't reduce the total of people that will get infected. Social distancing also doesn't increase your chances of surviving an infection. There is substantial evidence for other viral infections that infection severity (spanning from asymptomatic to dead) is related to dosage. There is limited information so far for covid19 but some informal evidence that this is true for it too: Young healthcare workers appear to be dying a a much higher rate than similarly healthy members of the public who are sars-cov-2 positive. If this is the case, social distancing will reduce the number of people who get serious infections and reduce the number who die. Even if not, preventing overload of the hospitals will significantly reduce the number who die. Delaying infections until we better know how to treat the disease from anti-virals to simply care techniques will almost certantly reduce the number who die. > Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). T CDC's projection was 1.7 million dead before accounting for hospital overload.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    These early predictions were based inflated fatality rates. Early on, testing was only done on sick patients. People who contract the virus and don't get sick or don't get sick enough to go to the hospital aren't counted. So this is a huge selection bias. You didn't bother to cite where you're getting this figure, but it looks like this projection dates back to March 13 [1] or earlier. If you have a study that projects what the fatalities would have been with a shorter isolation period (e.g. only march and first two weeks of April), that would be noteworthy. Pointing to this early CDC study as a figure for what would have transpired had the economy not been shut down is not sound. 1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coronavirus-model-210m-infected-1-7m-dead.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coro...
    - nullc 7y ago
      > These early predictions were based inflated fatality rates. Not so, for example the mortalities from the diamond princess are _higher_ than the ones being used to drive those projections. The fact that it takes time for people to die has held down the estimated mortality during exponential case growth.

nullc 7y ago

The projections without measures were well over a million dead and those projections did not consider the additional deaths of non-covid19 persons due to overloaded hospitals.

manfredo 7y ago
These projections were based on fatality rates well above what is actually being observed by countries conducting random testing. We're talking about an order of magnitude off.