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Then why are we doing any lockdowns at all? If most of the young are near-safe, we should have just isolated the 60+ and kept society running as usual for the r

Then why are we doing any lockdowns at all? If most of the young are near-safe, we should have just isolated the 60+ and kept society running as usual for the rest. Clearly a lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
That is an excellent question, and essentially exactly the argument Sweden is making. TBH, I have yet to hear a decent argument against this, given the following thoughts: 1. Development of a vaccine will take a minimum of 12 months, more like 18. 2. It is not feasible, either for democracy or our economy, to stay locked in/sheltered at home for this long. 3. Thus, the main concern should be to "flatten the curve": keep the infection rate low enough so that, even though people still get infected, hospital systems don't get overwhelmed. I think it's important to note that the only places yet that have had overwhelmed (or close to it) hospital systems had extreme density (Wuhan, NYC), often coupled with lots of mixing of young and old (Northern Italy). 4. A corollary to number 3 is that as long as hospital systems aren't overwhelmed, or close to it, that you shouldn't lock down further. The belief is that the majority of society becoming infected within 12/18 months is inevitable, so extreme lockdowns will do little beyond push deaths out a bit. 5. Do everything you can to protect the highly vulnerable (old, immuno-compromised) as they appear to be at exponential greater risk. I mean, as the US starts to open up, it is quite clear the virus has not been contained, so for better or for worse the above is the approach we are taking as well.
- cma 6y ago
  Sweden is 6th worst in deaths per capita in the world among non-microstates, and still isn't very close to herd immunity.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Natural herd immunity is an utter fantasy. There has never been herd immunity for polio, measles, or even for chicken pox. Herd immunity only happens when a critical mass of the population - >70% at a minimum - is given immunity by a vaccine. This creates a population with a low enough R to guarantee that outbreaks die out, even if some people aren't vaccinated. Even then it still doesn't guarantee personal immunity, because people in small clusters can still become infected. But instead of a national health emergency which threatens to overwhelm primary care, you get small localised individual/cluster outbreaks which are very much easier to handle.
    - somewhereoutth 6y ago
      Absolutely right. People need to understand this.
    - catalogia 6y ago
      > There has never been herd immunity for polio, measles, or even for chicken pox. I think you've got a selection bias there. Those illnesses are household names because they are/were so prevalent. But what of the illnesses that never became prevalent enough to become household names because populations developed immunity fast enough to suppress the spread?
      - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
        What's the last illness that never became prevalent enough to become a household name because populations developed immunity fast enough to suppress the spread? I can't think of any.
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      That diseases come in waves seems like evidence of herd immunity to me. Like starting with a naive population you get a wave of infection. People become immune, spreading (mostly) stops. Over the years immunity is weakened because of old people dying and new people being born. Eventually the fraction of the population that is immune is low enough that a new wave gets going.
- somewhereoutth 6y ago
  The alternative, which much of Europe is following, is lock down until cases are at sufficiently low level that test, trace and isolate can work effectively. Community wide measures such as mandatory mask wearing help with this. We are deeply embarrassed about Sweden.
  - makomk 6y ago
    The trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that test, trace and isolate can work effectively. The characteristics of Covid-19 - infection just from being in the same room as someone with no symptoms, low mortality, lots of asymptomatic cases and non-specific symptoms in most other cases - do not seem even remotely amenable to contact tracing-based approaches. Supposedly, Singapore and South Korea were proof that this could work anyway, but it seems to have failed in both places - Singapore had to give up and lock down after cases exploded, whilst South Korea also had a whole bunch of spread that completely escaped contact tracing and nowhere near enough testing to pick it back up again, but somehow managed to reverse it through stricter social distancing measures well short of a full lockdown for reasons no-one has explained. I'd be very interested to see what serology studies have to say about South Korea's actual infection rate.
    - somewhereoutth 6y ago
      Apparently (I can't back this up with sources right now) infections usually happen with someone you spend a significant amount of time with - e.g. together in a restaurant vs crossing their path at the supermarket. With mandatory masks on public transport and elsewhere, this distinction is reinforced and contact tracing becomes easier. It is hard to imagine SK's infection rate is anything other than very small, given their extremely low death rate (264 for a pop of ~50MM) - to insinuate otherwise is, well, questionable. Sadly a different dimension has crept into what should be a reasoned public health emergency response. I'm not sure from where, or why, or indeed who - but we should be vigilant, the cost is terrible.
jdsully 6y ago
Because we didn't know just how many people were asymptomatic when the lockdowns first began. The virus is still far worse than the flu but not nearly as bad as initially feared. At this point I think reasonable people can disagree on the right approach moving forward. Unfortunately once you scare everyone into locking down you can't reverse course on a dime.
- toshk 6y ago
  I hear this sentiment often lately. But it always looked like 0.6-1 percent deathrate. Already in february this was suggested by one of the researchers at Hopkins, based on the nrs of South Korea at the time. And it's still around that percentage with the latest studies in Europe. Even though it sounds low, that's still a lot of deaths if left uncontrolled.
  - nradov 6y ago
    The latest data indicates an infection fatality rate of about 0.3%. https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Los-Angeles-antibody-study-coronavirus-mortality-15283660.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Los-Angeles...
    - toshk 6y ago
      Latest study in Spain around 1-1.3. 70,000 participants. https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-14/antibody-study-shows-just-5-of-spaniards-have-contracted-the-coronavirus.html https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-14/antibody-study... Most studies in Europe show this: 0,5 - 1.
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      NYC and Stockholm antibody tests would indicate an IFR more like 1% or a little over. Though I'd be cautious about being too confident in antibody study results, for now. A lot can depend on test accuracy (especially where covid is rare anyway).
    - radioactivist 6y ago
cm2187 6y ago
That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy. But it didn't go well because the vulnerable population wasn't isolated. My opinion is that it is because instead of passing on the message of what to do to isolate the sick and the elderly, the media were busy trashing "evil Boris" and his herd immunity strategy. And no the lockdown isn't about "lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus", it is about keeping the pace of the tiny fraction of infections that go bad to under the capacity of the NHS / ICUs. At least that was the stated goal. It seems now that we have switched to a goal of zero infection (and not sure that it makes sense, given that I hear the WHO now refering to this virus as an "endemic disease").
- justin66 6y ago
  > That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy. This is just completely wrong. It's a useful exercise to work out how many people would need to die before herd immunity could be achieved. Use mortality numbers based on what we've learned about the virus and estimates of what percentage of the population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity based on the behavior of any number of other viruses. And that's assuming infection confers immunity with this virus, which we don't know yet.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown? As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. With appropriate isolation we could absolutely achieve herd immunity with minimal losses. Instead we have sent covid infected patients back in nursing homes in both the US and the UK with catastrophic results.
    - justin66 6y ago
      > As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. The numbers don't look very immaterial to me. [1] Granted there's a weird amount of variance between regions and there's a lot that isn't certain. > If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown? (Let's hope some reasonable amount of immunity is conferred! It seems likely, but I think it's useful to consider the worst case.) I'd be happy with people doing what they ought to be doing anyway: exercising some caution and doing the obvious things to limit the spreading of the bug. I'm in a constant state of amazement at how bad we are at all of this. In the crazy worst case where there isn't much immunity conferred by the infection, we could hopefully rely on Darwin to eventually provide us with a less dangerous version of the virus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mortality_by_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mort...
stanfordkid 6y ago
4% of mortalities are <65, with ~1% mortality rate overall. 2017 flu had 60k deaths, despite likely undercounting. As Nietzsche once put it: “insanity is rare in individuals, but common in the herd”
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Around a quarter of cases are working age. A non-trivial proportion of those become seriously ill for months. It's possible they're going be left with permanent health problems. I know of one music app developer in his forties with no health issues who spent more than a month on a ventilator. He recovered - barely - but it's going to be a while before he's back to working full-time. Nonsense about flu statistics is just ignorable whataboutery. Covid is a very nasty illness, and until a vaccine is developed it has potential to do huge direct damage. Without lockdowns it would have spread like wildfire and a lot of people would have been off work at the same time. Some food supply chains in the US are already struggling. Imagine what would have happened with only ten times more casualties.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Statistics on flu deaths are effectively fabricated through statistical voodoo. Health authorities count up how many people died from pneumonia, subtract the number of people they think ought to have died, and label the difference "flu deaths". I'll grudgingly admit that there are valid use cases for this kind of thing, but it's meaningless to directly compare it to a count of people where a doctor wrote "COVID-19" on the death certificate.
  - glofish 6y ago
    doesn't this cut both ways though? you could be severely sick with some other disease then get COVID19 in addition, what killed you? I think 10 years from now we will look back at this time as the time where everything was counted as COVID19
    - pgwhalen 6y ago
      Despite the your downvoters, there is good evidence to suggest we are already doing that in the US. According to the CDC, for the week ending in 5/9, there were more COVID19 deaths than there were "excess" deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm These data are subject to being modified after the fact.
tinus_hn 6y ago
Clearly a lot of people are not in a position to make these decisions. One they are being scared into thinking that if they get infected they will die a horrible death and so will everyone around them. This is obviously an exaggeration because for people under 40 the vast majority will not even notice the infection. And please if you reply grasping at the straw of ‘some people are ill for long’ specify how many people and if they are seriously ill or just tired for a long time. Second they are not in a position to set policy. The people who make the rules are even more scared and make the rules much tighter than is useful.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  You're totally missing the point of current public policy. We know that sars-cov-2 is highly contagious - R0 values up above 2 without any action. This means that with no action, the entire population will be infected rapidly. Out of the entire population a certain percentage will have no symptoms. Another group will have mild symptoms. Another group will have severe symptoms. Another group will require hospitalization. Members of the last two groups will die. The point of current public policy (at least from the POV of the people smart enough to understand and propose it) has been to decrease R0 so that it takes much longer for the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway unless an effective vaccine appears quickly). Why would we want to do that? Because if the entire population is rapidly infected, the numbers requiring hospitalization would vastly exceed the resources of our medical system. That means that: 1. Some of those who might have survived COVID-19 had they received effective hospital care will die. 2. People with other treatements requiring hospital care will find it difficult or impossible to receive it, leading to more deaths from non-COVID-19 causes. None of this has anything to do with "if they get infected they will die a horrible death and so will everyone around them" - that's nothing but a silly strawman painted by people who, for some reason, want to downplay the risk of allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    No, I’m not buying this story. Everywhere you see governments building up these huge emergency hospitals and then tearing them down again without them being used. If your story were true they’d keep the hospitals and loosen restrictions to maximize use, saving the economy while keeping a safe margin. > allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population Sounds so scary but > the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway) Is the same thing, but put in a not scary manner. These people making the rules are not as smart as you think they are. When the rules were made there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of pressure to take action. Logically some of the rules work and some don’t. Truly smart people would just say ‘oh well we will remove the rules that don’t work’. Instead what you see is clinging to ineffective rules, defending them with poor excuses as doing otherwise means admitting you were wrong. In the US, look at mr. Cuomo and his indefensible failure of sending infected old people to nursing homes. It’s clearly the worst thing to do and look at his reaction now that the results are in! He just says he didn’t know even though his signature is on the page ordering it. How smart is that.
rsynnott 6y ago
_Permanently totally isolating everyone over 60_ is clearly not feasible. In a scenario where it was allowed spread willy-nilly through the younger population, that isolation would have to be absolute. And it is not like under 60s are all that safe. In the US 25% of deaths are under 65.
- orangecat 6y ago
  _Permanently totally isolating everyone over 60_ is clearly not feasible. More or less infeasible than throwing millions of people out of work and forbidding everyone from seeing their friends and families? And it is not like under 60s are all that safe. In the US 25% of deaths are under 65. 85% of the US population is under 65. So 15% of the population has 75% of the deaths, meaning a randomly selected person over 65 is 17 times more likely to have died than a random person under 65.
vorpalhex 6y ago
The point of lockdowns in the US was to delay the peak of cases until hospitals had time to prepare and could more likely have enough capacity. This seems a very difficult point for most people. Early on, we had an exponential rise in cases and it appeared we would overwhelm hospitals. Therefore quarantine orders were issued (rather delayed imo) to offset the growth and allow hospitals to not have more cases than beds/equipment. We had a lot less data initially and had to be proactive. The initial call was correct, and slowly easing it with monitoring is correct now.
- catalogia 6y ago
  There were different points to lockdown for different people. Depending on who you talked to, the point of lockdown was to flatten the curve, or to eradicate corona, or to wait until corona was eradicated. There was never broad consensus about what the point of lockdowns was.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    the entirety of US popular culture, excluding fox news, was dominated by the meme "flatten the curve" in March and into April. it is totally disingenous to suggest that anyone actually proposing the "lockdown" claimed that it was about eradicating it or waiting for it to pass (both of which are widely understood to be absurd goals at this time).
    - catalogia 6y ago
      I don't watch cable news. I'm talking about the attitudes of people I've seen expressed online (including this website) or in public.
TomK32 6y ago
Yes that was my thinking when Italy locked down the first little towns and I'm still with that opinion. Not many viruses target specific groups of the population, but this one does and it was clear by end of February. For politicians it was just easier to lock us all in because such measures are more accepted by the public if everyone has to give up and not just a few. On the other hand, the lockdown for all created so much noise that we didn't focus enough on those at risk and easing their lockdown in some way. Even Sweden got it wrong by banning visits to elderly homes only by late March. Besides the lockdown for elderly (and a growing list of others at risk) I wish they'd broken up elderly and care homes where-ever possible. If just half the residents moved to a younger relative for a year (and pay the relative for their work, obviously) the homes might not be those death traps they are. Here in Austria the government worked a lot with Angst. It went so far that the younger were more afraid of the virus than the elderly. I had to spend days to persuade a 35-yr-old that she doesn't have to be afraid and from her initial "I don't want this virus" position she moved to "I already had it" six weeks after...
- makomk 6y ago
  Banning visits to the elderly in care homes in late March is better than Singapore, which amazingly didn't ban them until the start of April: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/no-visitors-allowed-at-nursing-homes-until-end-of-month https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/no-visitors-allowed-a... (This was back when the press elsewhere were still pointing to Singapore as the coronavirus success story everyone else should follow. The first foreign news story noticing the warning signs was literally that day, and the existing narrative carried on for a while elsewhere.)
alwillis 6y ago
If most of the young are near-safe, we should have just isolated the 60+ and kept society running as usual for the rest. Young people in their 20's and 30's are dying too, just at a lower percentage. Many young people who survive COVID-19 end up with permanent lung damage and other on-going issues. A New York Times staffer who's 33-years old ran 3 miles and walked 10 more the day before she came down with COVID-19 on April 17. And now this: "I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping."—https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/coronavirus-young-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/coronavirus-young...
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  > Young people in their 20's and 30's are dying too, just at a lower percentage. Far lower. It may be still undesirable, but if we want to talk about risk, there is no absence of risk for anyone, yet the risk changes a lot depending on age and comorbidities. This matters if one wants to take the risk or not, given that it will never be zero. > Many young people who survive COVID-19 end up with permanent lung damage and other on-going issues. Some of these issues apply to any type of pneumonia. It takes a year or so to fully recover if you had a bad one. And to evaluate "permanent" damage, we need more time. It would be better to say "we don't know yet if the damage is permanent or not".

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

That is an excellent question, and essentially exactly the argument Sweden is making. TBH, I have yet to hear a decent argument against this, given the following thoughts: 1. Development of a vaccine will take a minimum of 12 months, more like 18. 2. It is not feasible, either for democracy or our economy, to stay locked in/sheltered at home for this long. 3. Thus, the main concern should be to "flatten the curve": keep the infection rate low enough so that, even though people still get infected, hospital systems don't get overwhelmed. I think it's important to note that the only places yet that have had overwhelmed (or close to it) hospital systems had extreme density (Wuhan, NYC), often coupled with lots of mixing of young and old (Northern Italy). 4. A corollary to number 3 is that as long as hospital systems aren't overwhelmed, or close to it, that you shouldn't lock down further. The belief is that the majority of society becoming infected within 12/18 months is inevitable, so extreme lockdowns will do little beyond push deaths out a bit. 5. Do everything you can to protect the highly vulnerable (old, immuno-compromised) as they appear to be at exponential greater risk. I mean, as the US starts to open up, it is quite clear the virus has not been contained, so for better or for worse the above is the approach we are taking as well.

cma 6y ago
Sweden is 6th worst in deaths per capita in the world among non-microstates, and still isn't very close to herd immunity.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Natural herd immunity is an utter fantasy. There has never been herd immunity for polio, measles, or even for chicken pox. Herd immunity only happens when a critical mass of the population - >70% at a minimum - is given immunity by a vaccine. This creates a population with a low enough R to guarantee that outbreaks die out, even if some people aren't vaccinated. Even then it still doesn't guarantee personal immunity, because people in small clusters can still become infected. But instead of a national health emergency which threatens to overwhelm primary care, you get small localised individual/cluster outbreaks which are very much easier to handle.
  - somewhereoutth 6y ago
    Absolutely right. People need to understand this.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    > There has never been herd immunity for polio, measles, or even for chicken pox. I think you've got a selection bias there. Those illnesses are household names because they are/were so prevalent. But what of the illnesses that never became prevalent enough to become household names because populations developed immunity fast enough to suppress the spread?
    - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
      What's the last illness that never became prevalent enough to become a household name because populations developed immunity fast enough to suppress the spread? I can't think of any.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    That diseases come in waves seems like evidence of herd immunity to me. Like starting with a naive population you get a wave of infection. People become immune, spreading (mostly) stops. Over the years immunity is weakened because of old people dying and new people being born. Eventually the fraction of the population that is immune is low enough that a new wave gets going.
somewhereoutth 6y ago
The alternative, which much of Europe is following, is lock down until cases are at sufficiently low level that test, trace and isolate can work effectively. Community wide measures such as mandatory mask wearing help with this. We are deeply embarrassed about Sweden.
- makomk 6y ago
  The trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that test, trace and isolate can work effectively. The characteristics of Covid-19 - infection just from being in the same room as someone with no symptoms, low mortality, lots of asymptomatic cases and non-specific symptoms in most other cases - do not seem even remotely amenable to contact tracing-based approaches. Supposedly, Singapore and South Korea were proof that this could work anyway, but it seems to have failed in both places - Singapore had to give up and lock down after cases exploded, whilst South Korea also had a whole bunch of spread that completely escaped contact tracing and nowhere near enough testing to pick it back up again, but somehow managed to reverse it through stricter social distancing measures well short of a full lockdown for reasons no-one has explained. I'd be very interested to see what serology studies have to say about South Korea's actual infection rate.
  - somewhereoutth 6y ago
    Apparently (I can't back this up with sources right now) infections usually happen with someone you spend a significant amount of time with - e.g. together in a restaurant vs crossing their path at the supermarket. With mandatory masks on public transport and elsewhere, this distinction is reinforced and contact tracing becomes easier. It is hard to imagine SK's infection rate is anything other than very small, given their extremely low death rate (264 for a pop of ~50MM) - to insinuate otherwise is, well, questionable. Sadly a different dimension has crept into what should be a reasoned public health emergency response. I'm not sure from where, or why, or indeed who - but we should be vigilant, the cost is terrible.

jdsully 6y ago

Because we didn't know just how many people were asymptomatic when the lockdowns first began. The virus is still far worse than the flu but not nearly as bad as initially feared. At this point I think reasonable people can disagree on the right approach moving forward. Unfortunately once you scare everyone into locking down you can't reverse course on a dime.

toshk 6y ago
I hear this sentiment often lately. But it always looked like 0.6-1 percent deathrate. Already in february this was suggested by one of the researchers at Hopkins, based on the nrs of South Korea at the time. And it's still around that percentage with the latest studies in Europe. Even though it sounds low, that's still a lot of deaths if left uncontrolled.
- nradov 6y ago
  The latest data indicates an infection fatality rate of about 0.3%. https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Los-Angeles-antibody-study-coronavirus-mortality-15283660.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Los-Angeles...
  - toshk 6y ago
    Latest study in Spain around 1-1.3. 70,000 participants. https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-14/antibody-study-shows-just-5-of-spaniards-have-contracted-the-coronavirus.html https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-14/antibody-study... Most studies in Europe show this: 0,5 - 1.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    NYC and Stockholm antibody tests would indicate an IFR more like 1% or a little over. Though I'd be cautious about being too confident in antibody study results, for now. A lot can depend on test accuracy (especially where covid is rare anyway).
  - radioactivist 6y ago

cm2187 6y ago

That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy. But it didn't go well because the vulnerable population wasn't isolated. My opinion is that it is because instead of passing on the message of what to do to isolate the sick and the elderly, the media were busy trashing "evil Boris" and his herd immunity strategy. And no the lockdown isn't about "lot of people are not willing to take the risk of contracting the virus", it is about keeping the pace of the tiny fraction of infections that go bad to under the capacity of the NHS / ICUs. At least that was the stated goal. It seems now that we have switched to a goal of zero infection (and not sure that it makes sense, given that I hear the WHO now refering to this virus as an "endemic disease").

justin66 6y ago
> That was the initial strategy of herd immunity, and everything we learned about this virus vindicated this strategy. This is just completely wrong. It's a useful exercise to work out how many people would need to die before herd immunity could be achieved. Use mortality numbers based on what we've learned about the virus and estimates of what percentage of the population would need to be infected to achieve herd immunity based on the behavior of any number of other viruses. And that's assuming infection confers immunity with this virus, which we don't know yet.
- cm2187 6y ago
  If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown? As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. With appropriate isolation we could absolutely achieve herd immunity with minimal losses. Instead we have sent covid infected patients back in nursing homes in both the US and the UK with catastrophic results.
  - justin66 6y ago
    > As for the death rate, the rate to the non vulnerable population is immaterial. The numbers don't look very immaterial to me. [1] Granted there's a weird amount of variance between regions and there's a lot that isn't certain. > If you are still questioning whether infection confers immunity, then what other strategy than herd immunity do you suggest? If we don’t develop immunity naturally, there won’t be a vaccine either. Permanent lockdown? (Let's hope some reasonable amount of immunity is conferred! It seems likely, but I think it's useful to consider the worst case.) I'd be happy with people doing what they ought to be doing anyway: exercising some caution and doing the obvious things to limit the spreading of the bug. I'm in a constant state of amazement at how bad we are at all of this. In the crazy worst case where there isn't much immunity conferred by the infection, we could hopefully rely on Darwin to eventually provide us with a less dangerous version of the virus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mortality_by_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mort...

stanfordkid 6y ago

4% of mortalities are <65, with ~1% mortality rate overall. 2017 flu had 60k deaths, despite likely undercounting. As Nietzsche once put it: “insanity is rare in individuals, but common in the herd”

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Around a quarter of cases are working age. A non-trivial proportion of those become seriously ill for months. It's possible they're going be left with permanent health problems. I know of one music app developer in his forties with no health issues who spent more than a month on a ventilator. He recovered - barely - but it's going to be a while before he's back to working full-time. Nonsense about flu statistics is just ignorable whataboutery. Covid is a very nasty illness, and until a vaccine is developed it has potential to do huge direct damage. Without lockdowns it would have spread like wildfire and a lot of people would have been off work at the same time. Some food supply chains in the US are already struggling. Imagine what would have happened with only ten times more casualties.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Statistics on flu deaths are effectively fabricated through statistical voodoo. Health authorities count up how many people died from pneumonia, subtract the number of people they think ought to have died, and label the difference "flu deaths". I'll grudgingly admit that there are valid use cases for this kind of thing, but it's meaningless to directly compare it to a count of people where a doctor wrote "COVID-19" on the death certificate.
- glofish 6y ago
  doesn't this cut both ways though? you could be severely sick with some other disease then get COVID19 in addition, what killed you? I think 10 years from now we will look back at this time as the time where everything was counted as COVID19
  - pgwhalen 6y ago
    Despite the your downvoters, there is good evidence to suggest we are already doing that in the US. According to the CDC, for the week ending in 5/9, there were more COVID19 deaths than there were "excess" deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm These data are subject to being modified after the fact.

tinus_hn 6y ago

Clearly a lot of people are not in a position to make these decisions. One they are being scared into thinking that if they get infected they will die a horrible death and so will everyone around them. This is obviously an exaggeration because for people under 40 the vast majority will not even notice the infection. And please if you reply grasping at the straw of ‘some people are ill for long’ specify how many people and if they are seriously ill or just tired for a long time. Second they are not in a position to set policy. The people who make the rules are even more scared and make the rules much tighter than is useful.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
You're totally missing the point of current public policy. We know that sars-cov-2 is highly contagious - R0 values up above 2 without any action. This means that with no action, the entire population will be infected rapidly. Out of the entire population a certain percentage will have no symptoms. Another group will have mild symptoms. Another group will have severe symptoms. Another group will require hospitalization. Members of the last two groups will die. The point of current public policy (at least from the POV of the people smart enough to understand and propose it) has been to decrease R0 so that it takes much longer for the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway unless an effective vaccine appears quickly). Why would we want to do that? Because if the entire population is rapidly infected, the numbers requiring hospitalization would vastly exceed the resources of our medical system. That means that: 1. Some of those who might have survived COVID-19 had they received effective hospital care will die. 2. People with other treatements requiring hospital care will find it difficult or impossible to receive it, leading to more deaths from non-COVID-19 causes. None of this has anything to do with "if they get infected they will die a horrible death and so will everyone around them" - that's nothing but a silly strawman painted by people who, for some reason, want to downplay the risk of allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  No, I’m not buying this story. Everywhere you see governments building up these huge emergency hospitals and then tearing them down again without them being used. If your story were true they’d keep the hospitals and loosen restrictions to maximize use, saving the economy while keeping a safe margin. > allowing a virus with R0 > 2 to plough through a population Sounds so scary but > the entire population to become infected (which will almost certainly happen anyway) Is the same thing, but put in a not scary manner. These people making the rules are not as smart as you think they are. When the rules were made there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of pressure to take action. Logically some of the rules work and some don’t. Truly smart people would just say ‘oh well we will remove the rules that don’t work’. Instead what you see is clinging to ineffective rules, defending them with poor excuses as doing otherwise means admitting you were wrong. In the US, look at mr. Cuomo and his indefensible failure of sending infected old people to nursing homes. It’s clearly the worst thing to do and look at his reaction now that the results are in! He just says he didn’t know even though his signature is on the page ordering it. How smart is that.

rsynnott 6y ago

_Permanently totally isolating everyone over 60_ is clearly not feasible. In a scenario where it was allowed spread willy-nilly through the younger population, that isolation would have to be absolute. And it is not like under 60s are all that safe. In the US 25% of deaths are under 65.

orangecat 6y ago
_Permanently totally isolating everyone over 60_ is clearly not feasible. More or less infeasible than throwing millions of people out of work and forbidding everyone from seeing their friends and families? And it is not like under 60s are all that safe. In the US 25% of deaths are under 65. 85% of the US population is under 65. So 15% of the population has 75% of the deaths, meaning a randomly selected person over 65 is 17 times more likely to have died than a random person under 65.

vorpalhex 6y ago

The point of lockdowns in the US was to delay the peak of cases until hospitals had time to prepare and could more likely have enough capacity. This seems a very difficult point for most people. Early on, we had an exponential rise in cases and it appeared we would overwhelm hospitals. Therefore quarantine orders were issued (rather delayed imo) to offset the growth and allow hospitals to not have more cases than beds/equipment. We had a lot less data initially and had to be proactive. The initial call was correct, and slowly easing it with monitoring is correct now.

catalogia 6y ago
There were different points to lockdown for different people. Depending on who you talked to, the point of lockdown was to flatten the curve, or to eradicate corona, or to wait until corona was eradicated. There was never broad consensus about what the point of lockdowns was.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  the entirety of US popular culture, excluding fox news, was dominated by the meme "flatten the curve" in March and into April. it is totally disingenous to suggest that anyone actually proposing the "lockdown" claimed that it was about eradicating it or waiting for it to pass (both of which are widely understood to be absurd goals at this time).
  - catalogia 6y ago
    I don't watch cable news. I'm talking about the attitudes of people I've seen expressed online (including this website) or in public.

TomK32 6y ago

Yes that was my thinking when Italy locked down the first little towns and I'm still with that opinion. Not many viruses target specific groups of the population, but this one does and it was clear by end of February. For politicians it was just easier to lock us all in because such measures are more accepted by the public if everyone has to give up and not just a few. On the other hand, the lockdown for all created so much noise that we didn't focus enough on those at risk and easing their lockdown in some way. Even Sweden got it wrong by banning visits to elderly homes only by late March. Besides the lockdown for elderly (and a growing list of others at risk) I wish they'd broken up elderly and care homes where-ever possible. If just half the residents moved to a younger relative for a year (and pay the relative for their work, obviously) the homes might not be those death traps they are. Here in Austria the government worked a lot with Angst. It went so far that the younger were more afraid of the virus than the elderly. I had to spend days to persuade a 35-yr-old that she doesn't have to be afraid and from her initial "I don't want this virus" position she moved to "I already had it" six weeks after...

makomk 6y ago
Banning visits to the elderly in care homes in late March is better than Singapore, which amazingly didn't ban them until the start of April: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/no-visitors-allowed-at-nursing-homes-until-end-of-month https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/no-visitors-allowed-a... (This was back when the press elsewhere were still pointing to Singapore as the coronavirus success story everyone else should follow. The first foreign news story noticing the warning signs was literally that day, and the existing narrative carried on for a while elsewhere.)

alwillis 6y ago

If most of the young are near-safe, we should have just isolated the 60+ and kept society running as usual for the rest. Young people in their 20's and 30's are dying too, just at a lower percentage. Many young people who survive COVID-19 end up with permanent lung damage and other on-going issues. A New York Times staffer who's 33-years old ran 3 miles and walked 10 more the day before she came down with COVID-19 on April 17. And now this: "I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping."—https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/coronavirus-young-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/coronavirus-young...

lbeltrame 6y ago
> Young people in their 20's and 30's are dying too, just at a lower percentage. Far lower. It may be still undesirable, but if we want to talk about risk, there is no absence of risk for anyone, yet the risk changes a lot depending on age and comorbidities. This matters if one wants to take the risk or not, given that it will never be zero. > Many young people who survive COVID-19 end up with permanent lung damage and other on-going issues. Some of these issues apply to any type of pneumonia. It takes a year or so to fully recover if you had a bad one. And to evaluate "permanent" damage, we need more time. It would be better to say "we don't know yet if the damage is permanent or not".