3 ms·

If a disease arises with a much higher fatality rate, lockdowns are still pretty much our only tool to deal with it. Eradication or not, we’re not going to surv

If a disease arises with a much higher fatality rate, lockdowns are still pretty much our only tool to deal with it. Eradication or not, we’re not going to survive a 35% IFR virus with business-as-usual plus hand washing and masks. China will locally eradicate it, and here in the US well… I dunno. It’s not looking great.

donkeyd 4y ago
> China will locally eradicate it You understand that with globalization, this makes no sense, right? It will return, again and again. Economic impact of always going into lockdown will be insane. Another reason for western companies to become less dependent on China in the long term, massive reduction in productivity in the short term.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  With luck it means we’ll survive a high-IFR virus until vaccines are available, and won’t lose a huge chunk of our population and suffer collapse. China will even have a working economy. In the face of something truly deadly there aren’t good alternatives. China’s unwillingness/inability to switch to a post-vaccine strategy is the error here, not their very successful use of quarantine+lockdown pre-vaccine.
- cm2187 4y ago
  Particularly given the it is now endemic in so many countries.
bilsbie 4y ago
If there ever was such a disease you’d actually have the opposite problem of convincing people to go out and keep society running.
cm2187 4y ago
The biggest casualty of covid is the trust in health authorities. Unnecessary lockdowns (assuming those even work which is really not clear given the absence of inflection point in cases when they were introduced in europe) will just lead to even more distrust. Also high IFR viruses usually have high symptoms. Much easier to contain a disease when you can tell people are sick. People feeling sick will also travel and spread less. What made covid so widespread is that it was so mild to so many people. So there is a kind of bell curve of deadliness vs infectiousness. So not really convinced by those argument of what if covid was so much deadlier. You would need a virus with zero symptom while you are infectious, and then that kills you, like an airborne HIV. Anything is possible but with ifs...

donkeyd 4y ago

> China will locally eradicate it You understand that with globalization, this makes no sense, right? It will return, again and again. Economic impact of always going into lockdown will be insane. Another reason for western companies to become less dependent on China in the long term, massive reduction in productivity in the short term.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
With luck it means we’ll survive a high-IFR virus until vaccines are available, and won’t lose a huge chunk of our population and suffer collapse. China will even have a working economy. In the face of something truly deadly there aren’t good alternatives. China’s unwillingness/inability to switch to a post-vaccine strategy is the error here, not their very successful use of quarantine+lockdown pre-vaccine.
cm2187 4y ago
Particularly given the it is now endemic in so many countries.

bilsbie 4y ago

If there ever was such a disease you’d actually have the opposite problem of convincing people to go out and keep society running.

cm2187 4y ago

The biggest casualty of covid is the trust in health authorities. Unnecessary lockdowns (assuming those even work which is really not clear given the absence of inflection point in cases when they were introduced in europe) will just lead to even more distrust. Also high IFR viruses usually have high symptoms. Much easier to contain a disease when you can tell people are sick. People feeling sick will also travel and spread less. What made covid so widespread is that it was so mild to so many people. So there is a kind of bell curve of deadliness vs infectiousness. So not really convinced by those argument of what if covid was so much deadlier. You would need a virus with zero symptom while you are infectious, and then that kills you, like an airborne HIV. Anything is possible but with ifs...