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> The political powers at the time acted like we'd lock down for a few weeks and then everything would go back to normal. I mean we should have. It was quite c

> The political powers at the time acted like we'd lock down for a few weeks and then everything would go back to normal. I mean we should have. It was quite clear very early on that the computer models predicting 4% IFRs were off by almost an order of magnitude.

treis 4y ago
Even if we legally went back to normal that doesn't mean consumer demand would have gone back to normal. It was pretty clear that it wouldn't have gone back to normal until the vaccine was rolled out.
- vkou 4y ago
  Ding, ding, ding. I don't care what the government rules would have been, I wouldn't have been travelling/commuting to the office/going to the bar at any point in 2020. My employer would not have been organizing any in-person conferences. Which would, without the PPP/unemployment stopgap, would have happily put most of the firms in the travel/hospitality/conference organization industry out of business, due to a temporary disruption.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    So the existing management buys the firm for $1 in a liquidation and they come back in a few years. Sounds more like it was the creditors and investors that took on more risk than they could handle and got bailed out.
    - vkou 4y ago
      Liquidating a firm, and then coming back in a few years is not like turning a light switch off and on. It's like leaving a car to rust unattended in a field for a decade, and coming back to it. It's not going to be running, and it's going to take a mountain of work to get it into a running state. That's precisely why letting all these businesses die because of a temporary pandemic disruption is the penny-wise, pound-foolish decision. If you think it's fair for the owner class to have paid for PPP, I can get behind that, as I'm all for wealth taxes/increasing capital gains taxes/???.
      - Scoundreller 4y ago
        Usually courts in bankruptcy/liquidation release enough funds to maintain value. Many of these businesses were closed due to covid anyway and in barebones maintenance mode, as court would do if they felt there was some value left to sell. Sometimes bankruptcies are nearly invisible to customers and all in the background while creditors/investors lose their shirts.
Retric 4y ago
We hit over 1 million dead after flattening the curve, effective treatments, and a huge swath of the most vulnerable population getting vaccinated before infection. Models showing 4% IFRs without drastic measures like lockdowns seem fairly accurate to me. Simply letting COVID run rampant may have done less economic damage because it’s vastly less deadly to working age populations, but we would have barbarically sacrificed a significant chunk of the population for little gain.
- junofan 4y ago
  [flagged]
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  > Models showing 4% IFRs without drastic measures like lockdowns seem fairly accurate to me. The infection fatality rate is: deaths / anybody who is infected. Everybody is gonna get Covid, mitigations or not, so the denominator is always going to be the same. IFR is independent of mitigations. The only way the IFR might change is if healthcare systems got so overrun that they could no longer give care. This did not happen anywhere in the industrialized world. In fact all of the temporary field hospitals here in the states were closed virtually. The models showing a 4% IFR were pure fantasy. The IFR for a healthy human under like 65 is something less than %0.1. If you are a kid, your risks are lower than dying in a house fire.
  - Retric 4y ago
    You can’t argue about a zero social distancing world based on data from countries that implemented social distancing. Doing nothing means seeing what IFR rakes look like without a healthcare system. Even with all the existing measures, many areas ran out of ICU beds. All those deferred surgeries had an actual cost in human lives because you can’t simply delay cancer treatment without issue. I will say it again, some people with cancer died because of the COVID pandemic even without getting infected. Anything less than what we did would have further overburdened the healthcare system. Doing absolutely nothing and even less serious cases that responded to such basic measures as IV fluids would have killed people without a functioning healthcare system.
random314 4y ago
Yes, the IFR has been consistently estimated at 0.4 to 0.7 since February 2020. 0.5% of 8B world population works out to 160M excess deaths. This calculation assumes availability of medical facilities at 100% with no dead doctors or nurses. I don't think our public facilities can handle so many excess dead bodies unless we let some float down the river. https://www.google.com/search?q=india+covid+19+floating+bodies+street+pyres https://www.google.com/search?q=india+covid+19+floating+bodi... March 2020 - IFR estimate in China 0.6%, CFR in China estimated as 1.2% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118348/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118348/ "Adjusting for delay from confirmation to death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89–6.7) and 1.3% (95% CI: 0.38–3.6), respectively. Comparing deaths on board with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates from China, we estimated CFR and IFR in China to be 1.2% (95% CI: 0.3–2.7) and 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2–1.3), respectively." March 2020 - Symptomatic case fatality risk 1.4% https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7 "Using public and published information, we estimate that the overall symptomatic case fatality risk (the probability of dying after developing symptoms) of COVID-19 in Wuhan was 1.4% (0.9–2.1%), which is substantially lower than both the corresponding crude or naïve confirmed case fatality risk"

treis 4y ago

Even if we legally went back to normal that doesn't mean consumer demand would have gone back to normal. It was pretty clear that it wouldn't have gone back to normal until the vaccine was rolled out.

vkou 4y ago
Ding, ding, ding. I don't care what the government rules would have been, I wouldn't have been travelling/commuting to the office/going to the bar at any point in 2020. My employer would not have been organizing any in-person conferences. Which would, without the PPP/unemployment stopgap, would have happily put most of the firms in the travel/hospitality/conference organization industry out of business, due to a temporary disruption.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  So the existing management buys the firm for $1 in a liquidation and they come back in a few years. Sounds more like it was the creditors and investors that took on more risk than they could handle and got bailed out.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Liquidating a firm, and then coming back in a few years is not like turning a light switch off and on. It's like leaving a car to rust unattended in a field for a decade, and coming back to it. It's not going to be running, and it's going to take a mountain of work to get it into a running state. That's precisely why letting all these businesses die because of a temporary pandemic disruption is the penny-wise, pound-foolish decision. If you think it's fair for the owner class to have paid for PPP, I can get behind that, as I'm all for wealth taxes/increasing capital gains taxes/???.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Usually courts in bankruptcy/liquidation release enough funds to maintain value. Many of these businesses were closed due to covid anyway and in barebones maintenance mode, as court would do if they felt there was some value left to sell. Sometimes bankruptcies are nearly invisible to customers and all in the background while creditors/investors lose their shirts.

Retric 4y ago

We hit over 1 million dead after flattening the curve, effective treatments, and a huge swath of the most vulnerable population getting vaccinated before infection. Models showing 4% IFRs without drastic measures like lockdowns seem fairly accurate to me. Simply letting COVID run rampant may have done less economic damage because it’s vastly less deadly to working age populations, but we would have barbarically sacrificed a significant chunk of the population for little gain.

junofan 4y ago
[flagged]
spookthesunset 4y ago
> Models showing 4% IFRs without drastic measures like lockdowns seem fairly accurate to me. The infection fatality rate is: deaths / anybody who is infected. Everybody is gonna get Covid, mitigations or not, so the denominator is always going to be the same. IFR is independent of mitigations. The only way the IFR might change is if healthcare systems got so overrun that they could no longer give care. This did not happen anywhere in the industrialized world. In fact all of the temporary field hospitals here in the states were closed virtually. The models showing a 4% IFR were pure fantasy. The IFR for a healthy human under like 65 is something less than %0.1. If you are a kid, your risks are lower than dying in a house fire.
- Retric 4y ago
  You can’t argue about a zero social distancing world based on data from countries that implemented social distancing. Doing nothing means seeing what IFR rakes look like without a healthcare system. Even with all the existing measures, many areas ran out of ICU beds. All those deferred surgeries had an actual cost in human lives because you can’t simply delay cancer treatment without issue. I will say it again, some people with cancer died because of the COVID pandemic even without getting infected. Anything less than what we did would have further overburdened the healthcare system. Doing absolutely nothing and even less serious cases that responded to such basic measures as IV fluids would have killed people without a functioning healthcare system.

random314 4y ago

Yes, the IFR has been consistently estimated at 0.4 to 0.7 since February 2020. 0.5% of 8B world population works out to 160M excess deaths. This calculation assumes availability of medical facilities at 100% with no dead doctors or nurses. I don't think our public facilities can handle so many excess dead bodies unless we let some float down the river. https://www.google.com/search?q=india+covid+19+floating+bodies+street+pyres https://www.google.com/search?q=india+covid+19+floating+bodi... March 2020 - IFR estimate in China 0.6%, CFR in China estimated as 1.2% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118348/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118348/ "Adjusting for delay from confirmation to death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89–6.7) and 1.3% (95% CI: 0.38–3.6), respectively. Comparing deaths on board with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates from China, we estimated CFR and IFR in China to be 1.2% (95% CI: 0.3–2.7) and 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2–1.3), respectively." March 2020 - Symptomatic case fatality risk 1.4% https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7 "Using public and published information, we estimate that the overall symptomatic case fatality risk (the probability of dying after developing symptoms) of COVID-19 in Wuhan was 1.4% (0.9–2.1%), which is substantially lower than both the corresponding crude or naïve confirmed case fatality risk"