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> To naive little me, this implies that COVID deaths are also likely to have been reduced to ~1% from what they would have been without said measures. No, unfo

> To naive little me, this implies that COVID deaths are also likely to have been reduced to ~1% from what they would have been without said measures. No, unfortunately this is not true. While the flu season disappeared entirely, covid obviously did not -- it grew significantly. As it stands, the United States has seen just shy of 100,000 confirmed cases per million people; if that represented 1% of a "status quo" infection rate then you'd have to expect everyone in the US to have covid 10 times over. Instead, you have to think about the logistic model of infectious disease growth. As a very rough back of the envelope calculation, Covid has an R0 of about 2.5. It will spread throughout the population until about 60% is immune/recovered (which roughly matches the critical vaccination level seen in Israel, providing a reasonable check on this number). That implies that absent public health measures (i.e. where covid quickly spreads to a level that gives herd immunity), the United States would have seen about 200 million cases (330m0.6), or 600,000 cases per million. What that implies about deaths* depends on your estimates of how comprehensive case identification has been. If you think that we've tested and identified the vast majority of cases, then the "worst case" would be about 6x the current rate of infection and a similar increase in the total death rate. If on the other hand you think we've vastly undercounted cases, then maybe the US has in fact come close to that herd immunity level already, and the public health restrictions only succeeded in "flattening the curve" without changing the cumulative outcome much. Working at this from another angle, the CDC estimates (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena..., case 5) give an infection/fatality ratio of about 0.25% when you apply their demographic estimates to the US population writ large. If you back-fit an estimated number of covid cases from the currently-observed 500,000 deaths, you end up remarkably close to 200m total cases -- but you can also quibble here by noting that seniors' homes suffered a disproportionate share of infections and deaths, especially early in the pandemic.

oblio 5y ago
This model greatly depends on the rate of actual infection. Assuming a perfectly oblivious population, for example, where there are absolutely no protective measures in place† and people just act 100% as usual††, then the infection rate would have skyrocketed in a very short time and the death rate would have been much, much higher because of the healthcare system completely collapsing. You'd have people dying from tetanus because nobody would have been available to give them shots. People dying from easily stoppable bleeding, etc. So in this extreme case I think the total death rate caused by the pandemic could have easily been in the low millions. † Self distancing, masks, etc. †† Which would be quite irrational and hasn't actually happened even in places which otherwise ignored the pandemic: a certain percentage of the population self-isolated due to the survival instinct.

oblio 5y ago

This model greatly depends on the rate of actual infection. Assuming a perfectly oblivious population, for example, where there are absolutely no protective measures in place† and people just act 100% as usual††, then the infection rate would have skyrocketed in a very short time and the death rate would have been much, much higher because of the healthcare system completely collapsing. You'd have people dying from tetanus because nobody would have been available to give them shots. People dying from easily stoppable bleeding, etc. So in this extreme case I think the total death rate caused by the pandemic could have easily been in the low millions. † Self distancing, masks, etc. †† Which would be quite irrational and hasn't actually happened even in places which otherwise ignored the pandemic: a certain percentage of the population self-isolated due to the survival instinct.