Surely there has to be a balance between protecting the vulnerable at the cost of ruining the economy and protecting the economy at the cost of ruining the vulnerable.
How about instead of shutting down planet earth we advise people over the age of 60 to self-quarantine for a few months. The disease will run its course and then they will be protected by herd immunity. Neighbors and friends can drop off supplies on the front doorstep during this time.
50% of the patients in ICU are under 50, and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs.
If you don't take paranoid drastic measures, many millions will die.
If you do take paranoid drastic measures, lives will be saved, and then everyone will call you crazy for taking those measures because it ended up not that bad.
Just like people think Y2K was an overblown non-issue. Because it was fixed by millions of people working hard.
It's too early to know this for sure. I know personally, it took over two months for my lungs to recovery from pneumonia when I was younger. People are claiming this, but we won't know for a full year of this damage is non-recoverable.
But to your other point, yes a number of experts have said the really scary thing is the number of people in their 40s, who were healthy and non-smokers, who ended up on respirators in Italy and S Korea.
Also, since when was "just a flu" okay? The flu is really fucking bad. Twice in my life I had a flu take me out for over a week, and from the accounts of SARS-cov2, many are reporting it as feeling much worse than a flu with chills for days after.
Bad enough to merit shutting down nations, bankrupting companies, and causing a global recession?
And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days?
When the mortality rate is 0.2% for people < 60 years old, I just have a hard time believing that it requires the response we've been giving it. I would bet that for healthy, non-vulnerable adults (i.e. they don't have a pre-existing condition that makes them extra susceptible) the death rate is virtually 0%.
I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.
This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.
> I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.
Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?
1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis?
2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario.
I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb
If you're not aware of the situation there, I really urge you to look it up - doctors are saying they're having to choose who has the best survival chance to give attention to.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/13/opinion/coronavirus-c...
it's all about "flattening the curve" right now, to slow it down.
Y2K was an actual issue? I thought it was purely artificial issue created by computer layman. Year 2038 is an actual issue and there's really not much fuss about it, for many years.
That's still a lot of people. America is ~330 million. 1% is more than 3 million. Assuming only 1/3 of Americans get infected, there could still be an upper bound of a million people dying (although it'll more like be 300k ~ 1m with all the efforts to spread out everything).
The fatality rate is 0.6% or so, and almost entirely focused on the very old or il.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#measuring-and-interpr...
To be pedantic, it's not airborne. It's a respiratory virus. An airborne virus can linger in the air, possibly for hours or even a day. It's much much more transmissible.
The danger with SARS-cov2 is that, when going back to some of these cities where the first patients appeared, WHO researchers have found people with large viral load in their throats, and they didn't develop symptoms for over a week! So just being within 3~4 feet of them breathing could spread the disease. Sure, it's less likely than if they coughed or you shook hands, but it's still dangerous.
We don't even know for certain if getting it once makes you immune. How do you know herd immunity will work if you don't have the answer to something basic like that?
Isolating just over-60s only works to some extent. What about the healthcare and nursing home workers whom they interact with?
