5 ms·

So if we take Bolivia as an upper bound, we can assume that approximately 0.7% of the population would die to coronavirus in the absence of restrictions and wit

by throwaway22032 3y ago

So if we take Bolivia as an upper bound, we can assume that approximately 0.7% of the population would die to coronavirus in the absence of restrictions and with a fairly poor healthcare system. (Of course there will still be some level of individual change, e.g. those at risk are definitely not going to be going about as usual - they're still not in many places). My feeling then is that if we have a course of action that could have completely eliminated that 0.7%, e.g. it would result in zero covid or a perfect vaccine by the end of the course of action, assuming that it significantly curtails normal life (e.g. lockdown, no socialising, forced remote learning for schools, forced home working etc) we should spend approximately 0.7% of the average human lifespan doing it. So, a lockdown of 6-7 months could be justified to completely eliminate the virus. It was fairly quickly obvious that eliminating the virus was not possible, so we clearly shouldn't go for that long, but that's our starting point. The UK suffered approx 0.3% mortality that's about 0.4% better than Bolivia. The UK spent 24 months in various states of restrictions, and perhaps 12 months in fairly severe lockdowns to the extent that normal socialization (for example, going to a group or class to meet new people) was legally prohibited. Depending on how you define it, we spent 1.25-2.5% of the average lifespan in lockdowns for the sake of avoiding the deaths of 0.4% of the population. That's a horrendous trade off.

shagie 3y ago
I believe that you are missing a number of dimensions involved with the transmissibility when comparing the population and the population density which also factor in. It would be akin to comparing the mortality rate for Vermont and New York (which hold the economic level relatively constant). Vermont was 15.8/100,000 people while New York was 18.5/100,000. Things like how much international travel and how much intra-region travel? How many cases were there before vaccination was possible? Changing this to other units and using New York City in March of 2020 - living in NYC was 50 micromorts / day based on the excess deaths. So, each day have everyone in NYC go skydiving (8 micromorts per jump) 6 times and you'll have some people die from that... about 24,000 over the course of a month (data from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-risk-of-covid-19-in-perspective.html?unlocked_article_code=iTwCMboaK-EuZZ-Fvy58QyazipwCDaBdUniHUKVKsO8E3Wup0D9uDiH1rXg3iTQ7KcWxiaNMabI_DyZTXKOEw6JZdLZD7HOP-GiAOvvOAJ3pwgiNJ1tevIOLxbnXuySiSLH-B_SFqyo0I0KZyDlFnxD8lZrXtnDNhxTY-jx3OL7DCl-2moLhW7g6KBn4DG-eylIb9LsUBIJI3_tEPUN5CgUbxHAmp7iS2UMsQNoK0XMPqI2N3JwHY1ujqsIDmYY0S0xszeP99DEXmQZHm3zV5oFYCBxqCqcKaY9Wbn72afiYkGjLiq55QOlp8gU66Yg08jxbHtdybRq6ngPoiDICBUFMJhuclrc5WRTcCdjo-1xIiAUOhC2u&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-ris... ). And that was with mitigation efforts in place. I am not sure that it is fair to do a one dimensional "Bolivia was 0.7% mortality and UK was 0.3% mortality" because Covid hit at different times and had different amounts of transmissibility because of the different population densities which in turn impacted the amount that hospitals were able to care for people.

shagie 3y ago

I believe that you are missing a number of dimensions involved with the transmissibility when comparing the population and the population density which also factor in. It would be akin to comparing the mortality rate for Vermont and New York (which hold the economic level relatively constant). Vermont was 15.8/100,000 people while New York was 18.5/100,000. Things like how much international travel and how much intra-region travel? How many cases were there before vaccination was possible? Changing this to other units and using New York City in March of 2020 - living in NYC was 50 micromorts / day based on the excess deaths. So, each day have everyone in NYC go skydiving (8 micromorts per jump) 6 times and you'll have some people die from that... about 24,000 over the course of a month (data from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-risk-of-covid-19-in-perspective.html?unlocked_article_code=iTwCMboaK-EuZZ-Fvy58QyazipwCDaBdUniHUKVKsO8E3Wup0D9uDiH1rXg3iTQ7KcWxiaNMabI_DyZTXKOEw6JZdLZD7HOP-GiAOvvOAJ3pwgiNJ1tevIOLxbnXuySiSLH-B_SFqyo0I0KZyDlFnxD8lZrXtnDNhxTY-jx3OL7DCl-2moLhW7g6KBn4DG-eylIb9LsUBIJI3_tEPUN5CgUbxHAmp7iS2UMsQNoK0XMPqI2N3JwHY1ujqsIDmYY0S0xszeP99DEXmQZHm3zV5oFYCBxqCqcKaY9Wbn72afiYkGjLiq55QOlp8gU66Yg08jxbHtdybRq6ngPoiDICBUFMJhuclrc5WRTcCdjo-1xIiAUOhC2u&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-ris... ). And that was with mitigation efforts in place. I am not sure that it is fair to do a one dimensional "Bolivia was 0.7% mortality and UK was 0.3% mortality" because Covid hit at different times and had different amounts of transmissibility because of the different population densities which in turn impacted the amount that hospitals were able to care for people.