6 ms·

Would it have been scarier to have let this virus rip through the population?

1996 6y ago
People die. It's sad a fact of life. Now people will still die + their families will be without a job. This virus has a higher mortality than the flu, indeed. But the jury is still out to see if the current scenario will be better that the alternative (after you factor in suicides, depressions, overdoses, etc) But personally, I would have much preferred to live in the alternative world where the virus would have spread freely and we'd already be in herd immunity (and with the economy not destroyed)
- zajd 6y ago
  > This virus has a higher mortality than the flu, indeed. But I would have much preferred to live in the alternative world where the virus would have spread freely and we'd already be in herd immunity (and with the economy not destroyed) Do you really believe there would be no economic impact if government's hadn't shut down non-essential services? The world you're talking about would never exist, because a vast majority of the people sheltering in place are not doing so because the government told them to, but for the fear of infection or betterment of society.
- imba404 6y ago
  Companies are also taking steps to limit liability due to the virus, which also depresses employment and spending.
- jchw 6y ago
  We don’t have to guess whether or not COVID-19 could be contained to a meaningful degree. The EU seems to be succeeding at it right now. The U.S. is digging its own graves (unfortunately literally in this case.) If you think fear from COVID-19 would not have crippled the economy, well, maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see if that’s true in some localities. I’ll firmly bet on No, it totally would still, especially as the severity increases.
  - controversy 6y ago
    So far we are not digging more mass graves. While there is still some time for the lagging indicator to catch up, there doesn’t seem to be the massive deaths expected even though we have spikes. The states caused our deaths. New York and others shoved the elderly (an at risk population) into nursing homes. This isn’t due to good or bad responses from the Feds. The state governments are what killed us. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/opinions/steady-death-rate-covid-19-infections-spike-sepkowitz/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/opinions/steady-death-rate-co... Ultimately the disease was going to infect us. The only question was “could we slow the spread of the disease in such a way that we don’t overwhelm the medical system?”
  - twblalock 6y ago
    > If you think fear from COVID-19 would not have crippled the economy, well, maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see if that’s true in some localities. Two reasons to believe fear of the virus would not have, by itself, crippled the economy: 1. If people were that afraid they would have been sheltering in place before the government ordered them to do so, but they were not doing that, and they only started doing that when the government ordered them to. 2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended.
    - jchw 6y ago
      >1. If people were that afraid they would have been sheltering in place before the government ordered them to do so, but they were not doing that, and they only started doing that when the government ordered them to. People don't tend to fear something until it's tangible to them. When one of their family members or best friends gets ripped apart and then dumped into a grave, it will become a lot clearer very fast what kind of danger it can pose to oneself. >2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended. Some people are behaving that way, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly limited to America where we've decided wearing a mask is a political statement. (There are exceptions, but they are also often other places with similar or worse anti-science/medicine sentiment.) It's hard to even know what the outbreak would look like if both businesses and all ordinary people went back to normal. I know the economies have not recovered anywhere where lockdown has ended.
- castratikron 6y ago
  As long as nothing bad happened to you, right? The mortality is around 1%. So in the US alone that would leave over 3 million dead. Due to this 50 state lukewarm solution I think we'll ultimately see 1 million dead. The economy is made up of people, by the way.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    your moral high-ground has us increasing the powers of the government which is permanent. That's bad for everyone. Susceptible people could have stayed home, but now everyone else is paying for it. > The economy is made up of people, by the way. And there is almost always an economic boom after any plague or war. Vacuums get filled, create opportunity.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    In addition to the mortality we're seeing people with permanent damage to lungs, kidneys, heart and other organs. There are people in their 20s and 30s who didn't have "serious" cases (as in they didn't need to be hospitalized) that are still having symptoms 3 months after onset that prevent them from working. There are estimates that up to 10% of people who have covid have symptoms lasting longer than 3 weeks. There could be additional economic consequences if a largish number of people end up with permanent disabilities due to covid-19.
    - asdf21 6y ago
      From the get go, it was estimated that 80% of the world population would be infected within 18-24 months. All the shutdown was intended to do was to "slow the spread" from the 18 months to 24 months, and to hopefully keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once we knew how infectious it was, Covid was always expected to infect nearly everyone eventually, whether the economy was shut down or not.
      - UncleOxidant 6y ago
        The Chinese military has already given the go ahead to start injecting a vaccine developed by CanSino Biologics into military personnel. That's potentially 2 million people. https://fortune.com/2020/06/29/china-coronavirus-vaccine-military/ https://fortune.com/2020/06/29/china-coronavirus-vaccine-mil... This vaccine has already gone through their phase1&2 trials. Whereas in the US a vaccine probably won't be available for about a year, it's quite possible that other countries will follow China's lead and accelerate their vaccine development & trials. Slowing the spread was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed (flatten the curve) but it was also to minimize the number of people infected before either a vaccine or effective treatments became available. In the US a vaccine is likely still a year off, but we already know more about how to treat this than we did 4 months ago. And in another 4 months we'll likely have even better treatments and protocols. It's not inevitable that 80% have to be infected within 18-24 months. Other countries have slowed the spread with Hong Kong, S Korea and Taiwan being 3 of the more notable examples.
- udidmath88 6y ago
  We did the math: you’re 1 in 7 billion. If you’re in the US the 2nd amendment affords you the personal choice of thinning the herd by 1. “Internet macho man can’t do the work himself. Shakes the dice he’ll be spared while whatever at y’all” This shit is real tired. You said it yourself: humans don’t matter. You made your point. Good job belaboring the point any 10 year old can see. Exceptional people! Personally I’d prefer if folks like you ate your own words: you don’t matter individually any more than the rest of us then so who gives a fuck about your shallow Jaden Smith level twitter posts. Ffs social media is a wasteland of stupid
- andrepd 6y ago
  3 or 4 million people out of 350M would be expected to die. Maybe a bit of empathy would go a long way. Perhaps it's more a damning evidence for the unrestrained capitalism you hold so dear, that it spells catastrophe and misery if people aren't unable to keep working their bullshit jobs in the middle of the most pressing public health crisis of the last 100 years.
- disordinary 6y ago
  Suicide dropped substantially during lockdown, a lot of people realised that there's more to life than the daily grind. I can say from my experience that the economy runs a lot smoother and recovers a lot quicker if people aren't terrified about a pandemic causing them long term health implications and killing their family.
beaner 6y ago
Since this isn't our first pandemic, it would be interesting to look back on the 1918 pandemic and the 1950s pandemic and see if anything can be learned from them. I don't have an opinion either way because I haven't studied them. But due to how drastically this situation continues to affect the entire world, I'm kind of surprised that I haven't really seen any mainstream comparisons. How long did it last? What did they do? Was there a mass economic decline? If so, how could it have been avoided? If not, why not? Etc. I suspect that because these questions are not being asked, it may be the case that there are things to learn which are counter to popular narratives. I could definitely be very wrong about that. But it might be worthwhile to explore.
- ianmobbs 6y ago
  You don’t have to look at 1918. You can just look at nearly every other country in the world and how it’s been impacted. South Korea, Italy, China, and so on are all reopening or have been reopened despite having been hit just as hard as the US in the beginning - they just acted much more swiftly in the beginning. The less action our government takes, the longer this is going to go on.
  - beaner 6y ago
    Sure you don't have to, but then you potentially end up with a bias and you definitely end up with an incomplete perspective, when completeness is defined by considering the complete set of experienced circumstances. It may be the case that a hammer-like lockdown has largely stamped the virus out of many countries and that the US failed at that and is worse-off for it. It may also be the case that the US will build herd immunity faster and it the average infection rate and death rates will eventually converge to the same everywhere. We simply do not know yet, but people are judging as if we do. If we look to the past, we may be able to gain insight into how it played out until completion and how it was or was not affected by regulation, local & international laws, and the layperson perspective. In the current instance, no country has yet played it out to completion so that is something we could not learn from other countries right now.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
snazz 6y ago
It might have been possible to curb the spread of the virus without drastic economic shutdown measures. Japan, for instance, was able to avoid such a drastic lockdown. However, Japan is not the US; it is very different in terms of geography, culture, and economy. Whether or not that kind of plan would have worked, the US response was (and is) suboptimal.
twblalock 6y ago
> Would it have been scarier to have let this virus rip through the population? That's what is happening now in a lot of states that reopened. The lockdowns only delayed it. We wasted the opportunity of the lockdowns and didn't develop widespread testing, so as a result the lockdowns have done nothing except add government-enforced destruction of the economy on top of the damage the virus is doing.
- makomk 6y ago
  The US has massively increased the amount of testing it's doing. It has some of the most widespread testing out there. Your media just kept on continually moving the goalposts on testing for stupid, partisan reasons whilst intentionally misleading you all about how America compared to the rest of the world.
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    Source? (Genuinely, could you link to an article comparing testing per 100k?)
    - makomk 6y ago
      Not easily. One of the ways the media maintains this illusion is by carefully avoiding comparing coronavirus testing per-capita once the US figures became too good. For example, if you Google for this you'll only find articles from mid-May like this one: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/12/health/us-coronavirus-testing-per-capita/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/12/health/us-coronavirus-tes... and even those carefully only compare to the countries which had more tests per capita in order to push the narrative the US is far behind everyone else. Looking at the chart at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, the US is 27th, with most of the countries above it being much smaller ones which are not an apples-to-apples comparison because there's more of them to cherry-pick and the wealthiest few can massively increase their per-capita numbers just by ponying up money and buying a disproportionately large share of global supply of consumables. The only large countries above the US are Russia (extremely fishy), the UK (whose press has been pushing about as hard on the narrative that our testing is behind the rest of the world as the US media has), and Spain. About a quarter of the countries above the US on the list don't even have 100k people, and only the ones I listed have much above 10 million. (New York State - population 19 million - would also easily beat the UK, Russia and Spain if it were a country.) It's also well ahead of the well-publicised testing success stories like South Korea and Germany. Current testing rate in tests per day per capita is even more impressive: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing Incidentally, the US was one of the countries the UK press used to point at in order to convince us that our coronavirus testing was falling masssively behind the rest of the world and our government was failing us.
blackrock 6y ago
What if the virus really is a scam? I mean, yes, it is killing some old people, but not all. And it is killing some younger people, but not all. It’s mortality rate might be similar to the regular flu. But the kicker, is that Spain just announced that they detected the virus in their frozen waste water from January 2019. This is almost a whole year before China even detected it in December 2019. So it’s possible that this virus has been circulating around the world for a lot longer than we even realized. And if Spain’s announcement is legitimate, then, this means we have no clue where this virus could’ve originated.

1996 6y ago

People die. It's sad a fact of life. Now people will still die + their families will be without a job. This virus has a higher mortality than the flu, indeed. But the jury is still out to see if the current scenario will be better that the alternative (after you factor in suicides, depressions, overdoses, etc) But personally, I would have much preferred to live in the alternative world where the virus would have spread freely and we'd already be in herd immunity (and with the economy not destroyed)

zajd 6y ago
> This virus has a higher mortality than the flu, indeed. But I would have much preferred to live in the alternative world where the virus would have spread freely and we'd already be in herd immunity (and with the economy not destroyed) Do you really believe there would be no economic impact if government's hadn't shut down non-essential services? The world you're talking about would never exist, because a vast majority of the people sheltering in place are not doing so because the government told them to, but for the fear of infection or betterment of society.
imba404 6y ago
Companies are also taking steps to limit liability due to the virus, which also depresses employment and spending.
jchw 6y ago
We don’t have to guess whether or not COVID-19 could be contained to a meaningful degree. The EU seems to be succeeding at it right now. The U.S. is digging its own graves (unfortunately literally in this case.) If you think fear from COVID-19 would not have crippled the economy, well, maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see if that’s true in some localities. I’ll firmly bet on No, it totally would still, especially as the severity increases.
- controversy 6y ago
  So far we are not digging more mass graves. While there is still some time for the lagging indicator to catch up, there doesn’t seem to be the massive deaths expected even though we have spikes. The states caused our deaths. New York and others shoved the elderly (an at risk population) into nursing homes. This isn’t due to good or bad responses from the Feds. The state governments are what killed us. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/opinions/steady-death-rate-covid-19-infections-spike-sepkowitz/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/opinions/steady-death-rate-co... Ultimately the disease was going to infect us. The only question was “could we slow the spread of the disease in such a way that we don’t overwhelm the medical system?”
- twblalock 6y ago
  > If you think fear from COVID-19 would not have crippled the economy, well, maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see if that’s true in some localities. Two reasons to believe fear of the virus would not have, by itself, crippled the economy: 1. If people were that afraid they would have been sheltering in place before the government ordered them to do so, but they were not doing that, and they only started doing that when the government ordered them to. 2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended.
  - jchw 6y ago
    >1. If people were that afraid they would have been sheltering in place before the government ordered them to do so, but they were not doing that, and they only started doing that when the government ordered them to. People don't tend to fear something until it's tangible to them. When one of their family members or best friends gets ripped apart and then dumped into a grave, it will become a lot clearer very fast what kind of danger it can pose to oneself. >2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended. Some people are behaving that way, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly limited to America where we've decided wearing a mask is a political statement. (There are exceptions, but they are also often other places with similar or worse anti-science/medicine sentiment.) It's hard to even know what the outbreak would look like if both businesses and all ordinary people went back to normal. I know the economies have not recovered anywhere where lockdown has ended.
castratikron 6y ago
As long as nothing bad happened to you, right? The mortality is around 1%. So in the US alone that would leave over 3 million dead. Due to this 50 state lukewarm solution I think we'll ultimately see 1 million dead. The economy is made up of people, by the way.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  your moral high-ground has us increasing the powers of the government which is permanent. That's bad for everyone. Susceptible people could have stayed home, but now everyone else is paying for it. > The economy is made up of people, by the way. And there is almost always an economic boom after any plague or war. Vacuums get filled, create opportunity.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  In addition to the mortality we're seeing people with permanent damage to lungs, kidneys, heart and other organs. There are people in their 20s and 30s who didn't have "serious" cases (as in they didn't need to be hospitalized) that are still having symptoms 3 months after onset that prevent them from working. There are estimates that up to 10% of people who have covid have symptoms lasting longer than 3 weeks. There could be additional economic consequences if a largish number of people end up with permanent disabilities due to covid-19.
  - asdf21 6y ago
    From the get go, it was estimated that 80% of the world population would be infected within 18-24 months. All the shutdown was intended to do was to "slow the spread" from the 18 months to 24 months, and to hopefully keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once we knew how infectious it was, Covid was always expected to infect nearly everyone eventually, whether the economy was shut down or not.
    - UncleOxidant 6y ago
      The Chinese military has already given the go ahead to start injecting a vaccine developed by CanSino Biologics into military personnel. That's potentially 2 million people. https://fortune.com/2020/06/29/china-coronavirus-vaccine-military/ https://fortune.com/2020/06/29/china-coronavirus-vaccine-mil... This vaccine has already gone through their phase1&2 trials. Whereas in the US a vaccine probably won't be available for about a year, it's quite possible that other countries will follow China's lead and accelerate their vaccine development & trials. Slowing the spread was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed (flatten the curve) but it was also to minimize the number of people infected before either a vaccine or effective treatments became available. In the US a vaccine is likely still a year off, but we already know more about how to treat this than we did 4 months ago. And in another 4 months we'll likely have even better treatments and protocols. It's not inevitable that 80% have to be infected within 18-24 months. Other countries have slowed the spread with Hong Kong, S Korea and Taiwan being 3 of the more notable examples.
udidmath88 6y ago
We did the math: you’re 1 in 7 billion. If you’re in the US the 2nd amendment affords you the personal choice of thinning the herd by 1. “Internet macho man can’t do the work himself. Shakes the dice he’ll be spared while whatever at y’all” This shit is real tired. You said it yourself: humans don’t matter. You made your point. Good job belaboring the point any 10 year old can see. Exceptional people! Personally I’d prefer if folks like you ate your own words: you don’t matter individually any more than the rest of us then so who gives a fuck about your shallow Jaden Smith level twitter posts. Ffs social media is a wasteland of stupid
andrepd 6y ago
3 or 4 million people out of 350M would be expected to die. Maybe a bit of empathy would go a long way. Perhaps it's more a damning evidence for the unrestrained capitalism you hold so dear, that it spells catastrophe and misery if people aren't unable to keep working their bullshit jobs in the middle of the most pressing public health crisis of the last 100 years.
disordinary 6y ago
Suicide dropped substantially during lockdown, a lot of people realised that there's more to life than the daily grind. I can say from my experience that the economy runs a lot smoother and recovers a lot quicker if people aren't terrified about a pandemic causing them long term health implications and killing their family.

beaner 6y ago

Since this isn't our first pandemic, it would be interesting to look back on the 1918 pandemic and the 1950s pandemic and see if anything can be learned from them. I don't have an opinion either way because I haven't studied them. But due to how drastically this situation continues to affect the entire world, I'm kind of surprised that I haven't really seen any mainstream comparisons. How long did it last? What did they do? Was there a mass economic decline? If so, how could it have been avoided? If not, why not? Etc. I suspect that because these questions are not being asked, it may be the case that there are things to learn which are counter to popular narratives. I could definitely be very wrong about that. But it might be worthwhile to explore.

ianmobbs 6y ago
You don’t have to look at 1918. You can just look at nearly every other country in the world and how it’s been impacted. South Korea, Italy, China, and so on are all reopening or have been reopened despite having been hit just as hard as the US in the beginning - they just acted much more swiftly in the beginning. The less action our government takes, the longer this is going to go on.
- beaner 6y ago
  Sure you don't have to, but then you potentially end up with a bias and you definitely end up with an incomplete perspective, when completeness is defined by considering the complete set of experienced circumstances. It may be the case that a hammer-like lockdown has largely stamped the virus out of many countries and that the US failed at that and is worse-off for it. It may also be the case that the US will build herd immunity faster and it the average infection rate and death rates will eventually converge to the same everywhere. We simply do not know yet, but people are judging as if we do. If we look to the past, we may be able to gain insight into how it played out until completion and how it was or was not affected by regulation, local & international laws, and the layperson perspective. In the current instance, no country has yet played it out to completion so that is something we could not learn from other countries right now.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago

snazz 6y ago

It might have been possible to curb the spread of the virus without drastic economic shutdown measures. Japan, for instance, was able to avoid such a drastic lockdown. However, Japan is not the US; it is very different in terms of geography, culture, and economy. Whether or not that kind of plan would have worked, the US response was (and is) suboptimal.

twblalock 6y ago

> Would it have been scarier to have let this virus rip through the population? That's what is happening now in a lot of states that reopened. The lockdowns only delayed it. We wasted the opportunity of the lockdowns and didn't develop widespread testing, so as a result the lockdowns have done nothing except add government-enforced destruction of the economy on top of the damage the virus is doing.

makomk 6y ago
The US has massively increased the amount of testing it's doing. It has some of the most widespread testing out there. Your media just kept on continually moving the goalposts on testing for stupid, partisan reasons whilst intentionally misleading you all about how America compared to the rest of the world.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  Source? (Genuinely, could you link to an article comparing testing per 100k?)
  - makomk 6y ago
    Not easily. One of the ways the media maintains this illusion is by carefully avoiding comparing coronavirus testing per-capita once the US figures became too good. For example, if you Google for this you'll only find articles from mid-May like this one: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/12/health/us-coronavirus-testing-per-capita/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/12/health/us-coronavirus-tes... and even those carefully only compare to the countries which had more tests per capita in order to push the narrative the US is far behind everyone else. Looking at the chart at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, the US is 27th, with most of the countries above it being much smaller ones which are not an apples-to-apples comparison because there's more of them to cherry-pick and the wealthiest few can massively increase their per-capita numbers just by ponying up money and buying a disproportionately large share of global supply of consumables. The only large countries above the US are Russia (extremely fishy), the UK (whose press has been pushing about as hard on the narrative that our testing is behind the rest of the world as the US media has), and Spain. About a quarter of the countries above the US on the list don't even have 100k people, and only the ones I listed have much above 10 million. (New York State - population 19 million - would also easily beat the UK, Russia and Spain if it were a country.) It's also well ahead of the well-publicised testing success stories like South Korea and Germany. Current testing rate in tests per day per capita is even more impressive: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing Incidentally, the US was one of the countries the UK press used to point at in order to convince us that our coronavirus testing was falling masssively behind the rest of the world and our government was failing us.

blackrock 6y ago

What if the virus really is a scam? I mean, yes, it is killing some old people, but not all. And it is killing some younger people, but not all. It’s mortality rate might be similar to the regular flu. But the kicker, is that Spain just announced that they detected the virus in their frozen waste water from January 2019. This is almost a whole year before China even detected it in December 2019. So it’s possible that this virus has been circulating around the world for a lot longer than we even realized. And if Spain’s announcement is legitimate, then, this means we have no clue where this virus could’ve originated.