◦ "We can't be sure that dead people who tested positive died (only) from COVID-19?"
▪ That's true, of course. But it's also true of pretty much any infectious disease, I suspect.
None of whom we've decided to destroy the economy for.
▪ For example, in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, 95% of deaths may have been from co/secondary bacterial infections (at the time no antibiotics were available)
Need I point out that this is not 1918?
▪ The relevant question is whether the people who died would have died anyway without having contracted the Coronavirus
▪ Given that (at least currently) testing is based primarily on the display of *symptoms*, that seems extremely unlikely
Seems again?
◦ "Nicholas Nassim Taleb says those Imperial College people who did the modelling everybody is talking about are Imbeciles"
▪ Right, and he is arguing for *a more agressive suppression and social distancing policy, right now* than what they considered
▪ The disagreement is only about whether, after an initial successful suppression, one can hope to prevent multiple waves of the outbreak without near-continuous strict social distancing after the first wave
▪ Also, he says that about everybody who holds differing opinions from him
▪ [spacediver: just to be clear, I know that you understood all this]
He's right about modelers.
• The Need for Herd Immunity
◦ "If this virus is really as infectious as everybody thinks, we'll all get infected anyway. So we should just try to let it run through the population as quickly as possible so that we get herd immunity as quickly as possible (once ~60% of the population have had it)"
▪ Models of an unchecked outbreak show that, at peak, the number of infected people requiring intensive care would exceed the number of available critical care beds by factors of ~30.
▪ *Even without taking this into account*, the total number of deaths in the US is then projected to be ~2 million
▪ In reality, it would presumably be considerably worse, because once health care systems are overwhelmed, people who could have been saved will actually die.
▪ In the Imperial College modelling (sic) study, they assume (based on the available clinical evidence), that ~50% of critical care cases will die even when treatment is available.
▪ Once the supply of critical care beds is exhausted, that number would presumably become ~100%
▪ In addition, once the health care system is on its knees, some/many milder cases would probably become critical. Also people with other (unrelated) illnesses would likely die at increased rates
This is laziness and speculation, and is precisely why there is no toilet paper at Walmart.
▪ Perhaps most importantly, the example of China shows that *suppression* of the outbreak *is* possible, i.e. it is *not* inevitable that everybody will get infected.
• the challenge is managing this for long enough that a vaccine can get developed and deployed
China welded people inside their apartments. You probably think this is a good idea.
• Killing the Economy
◦ "Even if this outbreak/disease is as bad as people claim, our (over-)reaction to it may kill the economy. If this leads to a Great Depression, the result of that would be even worse."
▪ In order to assess this quantitatively, we'd need to have a good model for the impact of Great Depressions on the national death rate, life expectancy etc. I would be interested to know if anybody has reliable info on this.
You cannot be serious. You parade this baseless speculation about infection rates, and then request hard data from the 1920s?
▪ Perhaps more relevantly, what actions would proponents of this view actually take to prevent the collapse of the economy?
• It's certainly true that, right now, simply not enforcing social distancing protocols will keep the economy running normally for longer
• However, does anybody actually think that people would continue life as normal (go to work, eat in restaurants, drink in bars and pubs) once, say, 100,000 people have died and the health care system is broken?
They certainly as hell can't live normally as things are now, since you people have decided these things for us.
• And at *that* point, it would probably be too late to even attempt suppression strategies.
• The resulting Great Depression in *that* case could easily be worse than the one this strategy is trying to prevent.
This is sloppy thinking -- not really thinking at all, but merely feeling afraid. What we know now is that this thing has killed far fewer people than the flu ever does, and that fear of a worse outcome has irreparably damaged the economy of the country and the world. This is already a worse-case scenario, and you don't seem to grasp the significance of oil at $20 and the Dow at 10000, every waiter/waitress in the country unemployed, basic commodities unavailable or fought over, and the resulting effects on the welfare of those people you're trying to protect with your Social Distancing.
I realize that the above doesn't exactly paint a rosy picture, nor does it propose any great solutions.
The whole point is that it doesn't seem like there are any great solutions.
What governments and public health experts are trying to do is find the least bad option among several really awful ones. And the sort of second-guessing and conspiracy theorising that's going on everywhere - and the resulting non-compliance with recommendations - is in danger of making their already difficult job impossible.
The poor things.