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Thank you for the time and effort in the write up as well as your engagement, it is what we need. 2 points: while I sort of get your "order of magnitude lik a

Thank you for the time and effort in the write up as well as your engagement, it is what we need. 2 points: while I sort of get your "order of magnitude lik a flu" point I think it undermines your argument because you get lumped in with crazies. In your comments you also seem to conflate pandemic flu with seasonal flu, so I would suggest using "seasonal flu" if that is what you mean to avoid confusion. I think there are compelling arguments for ending the lockdown while still believing it is 10x worse than the flu. I don't like conflating the points myself, and rather prefer to just look at the actual IFR/R0 numbers. I don't know if this warrants a section, but I will say that I believe that the issue you discuss in this article is the lockdown, which is a political discussion. You have a lot of people on here asking for your credentials, or asking if you are an epidemiologist or virologist. While scientists can help inform us as a society on things like the IFR and R0, at the end of the day the core item under discussion here is a societal choice. In the US as a society appear to make a decision that infectious disease deaths up to about 70,000 people annually (a bad seasonal flu) do not warrant any official lockdown measures. The question of the threshold for various political responses is in fact a political question, not a question for virologists, therefore is the domain of all citizens. The author is as much an expert on this particular question as really anyone else. There has been a troubling severe censorship going on across platforms, including YouTube which would presumably not allow you to post this as a speech as it contradicts WHO guidelines, and our own "Hacker news" which ironically celebrates the culture of people building things of their own merit, not tied to past credentials, yet for a while has flagged this open and reasonable attempt to understand a political question.

mchusma 7y ago
One other quick note on my point above about case for lockdown. I am sure there are a ton of unknowns on the actual costs of the lockdown, but a back of the envelope suggest maybe 2 weeks of GDP seem directionally correct for the US, or about $1T. Assuming a QALY value of $100k. If you assume the official lockdown saved even 500k lives (only considering official lockdown, not other measures like voluntary social distancing, etc). If you assume the QALY for the group that died is 6 (I read this estimate somewhere but don't have source, seems to make ballpark sense because deaths are weighted towards elderly with comorbitities). Then you have a value of 100k500k6=$300B vs about $1T cost. You can play around with these variables, for example if you feel in the US our value for a QALY should be 2x Canada and 4x UK, then use $200k. If you feel that the majority of the viral suppression was from masks, distancing, and other voluntary efforts, then you might reduce the lives saved by the lockdown estimate down to 100k. Again, I dislike "like the flu" arguments, because I think we can just debate the actual merits of a policy. In this case, using almost any assumptions, the lockdown doesn't make sense versus other health measures we could be spending money on.

mchusma 7y ago

One other quick note on my point above about case for lockdown. I am sure there are a ton of unknowns on the actual costs of the lockdown, but a back of the envelope suggest maybe 2 weeks of GDP seem directionally correct for the US, or about $1T. Assuming a QALY value of $100k. If you assume the official lockdown saved even 500k lives (only considering official lockdown, not other measures like voluntary social distancing, etc). If you assume the QALY for the group that died is 6 (I read this estimate somewhere but don't have source, seems to make ballpark sense because deaths are weighted towards elderly with comorbitities). Then you have a value of 100k500k6=$300B vs about $1T cost. You can play around with these variables, for example if you feel in the US our value for a QALY should be 2x Canada and 4x UK, then use $200k. If you feel that the majority of the viral suppression was from masks, distancing, and other voluntary efforts, then you might reduce the lives saved by the lockdown estimate down to 100k. Again, I dislike "like the flu" arguments, because I think we can just debate the actual merits of a policy. In this case, using almost any assumptions, the lockdown doesn't make sense versus other health measures we could be spending money on.