There's this really brutal and obscure documentary I watch about the Congo War in the late 90s whenever I need to appreciate life. It's called "Kisangani Diary." It's far more terrifying than any horror movie because it's real.
It's a documentary about a relief mission that goes out into the Congo using disused railway tracks in order to feed 10s of thousands of Hutu refugees wandering around in the forest fleeing reprisals for the earlier genocide in Rawanda. They are starving to death and being chased by militia who are shooting at them from time to time from the forest. Absolutely no one except for the people in this relief mission cares about what happens to them.
The movie begins with the narrator saying that almost everyone you see in this film will be dead by the end of the movie. When I rewatched it lately, I wondered about those lines and what the future holds for us. What kind of documentary are we in? What if ending shelter in place fails. What if a deadlier strain shows up? What if this is the early days of WW III? All things to contemplate in my opinion, because I've been watching this since January and every week I expected things to get better and they've just been getting worse.
I have a serious medical condition. Germ control is my life and I already do remote work.
So far, the lock down has mostly been positives for me. Other people are making more of an effort at germ control than usual. A few meetings I usually attend have been cancelled and I've been working on a project via a virtual group I set up months ago.
I am hearing scary things, like one third of Americans didn't pay their rent this month. But I also am seeing the local Little Caesar's spring back to life after being on the verge of shutting down due to a lack of business. People are calling in orders and ordering online and business is back up to more normal levels.
The world has been on the brink before. I think we already have a lot of pieces in place, such as the ability to do online banking and remote work, for mitigating the worst of it and using it as an opportunity to transform the economy into something that reduces the odds of future pandemics.
98% of people who contract corona virus recover just fine, So lockdown is unnecessary.
The original reason for it was to not run out of ventilators, but we know now that ventilators have a mortality rate of 66% to 90%, so use a cannula instead as long as possible.
We should let corona run its course like every other flu year.
> What if a deadlier strain shows up?
Ebola is deadlier than corona. So's obesity.
But the flu we're dealing with is only about 2% fatal.
It’s not just running out of ventilators. It’s running out of beds, out of nurses, out of doctors.
The world can’t support 500 million people needing hospitalization simultaneously, ventilators or not.
The fatality rate isn’t the number that scares me, it’s the 10% or so who need emergency care. Maybe that number is inflated, but even 5% would be a global disaster.
> ... but we know now that ventilators have a mortality rate of 66% to 90%, so use a cannula instead as long as possible.
I assume you mean to use a nasal oxygen cannula for as long as possible (as opposed to an intravenous cannula, a nasal feeding cannula, or any of the other various types of cannulae). I could certainly be wrong, but I was under the impression that this is already being done, which is part of the reason the ventilator mortality rate is so high... selection bias.
The last-resort treatment is almost always going to have a high mortality rate due to selection bias.
Maybe you have some information I don't, but I haven't seen any evidence that doctors are idiots and widely making poor treatment decisions.
The interesting thing about Ebola is that b/c its symptoms are so horrible and fatality rate so high (50%), people treated it much more seriously, therefore helping to contain it. COVID-19's asymptomatic nature is a curse in this way, leading to many more deaths.
"98% of people who contract corona virus recover just fine"
I don't know where you get that number from, but there's still not nearly enough testing to know what percentage of infected people recover, and not enough tracking of recovered individuals to know if they're doing "just fine" afterward, suffer debilitating health issues, or something in between.
"lockdown is unnecessary. The original reason for it was to not run out of ventilators"
This is not true either. There are multiple reasons for the lockdown.
One of the primary reasons is to buy us more time to develop treatments and vaccines, and for more testing to be rolled out.
Another major reason is not to overwhelm the health care system. This has failed to some degree, but it would be way, way, way worse if there was no lcokdown at all and exponentially more people got sick all at once.
Yet another reason is to buy those people who haven't yet gotten sick more time and more life. If these people could hold out for a year or two, or even some months, that could mean more months or years of life for them. The importance of this can not be understated, and even if they do get infected eventually there'll hopefully be treatments available by then, and they'll stand more of a chance of survival.
Yet another benefit of a lockdown is to keep the disease from spreading further. The outbreak can be managed if we test enough people and quarantine them as infected people are detected. This is the main hope that increased testing give us, and that testing just wasn't even available in the US a month ago, and even now we're just beginning to get that capacity, though we still need way more tests.
"ventilators have a mortality rate of 66% to 90%"
According to Daniel Griffin of the infectious disease department at Columbia University, and chief of infectious disease at ProHealth Care Associates (the largest physician-owned multi-specialty practice in the country, with about 1000 physicians and 3 million patients in the Tri-State Area, with 240 practices, 24 urgent care centers) and on the COVID-19 response team and his boots on the ground in NY hospitals, the survival rate for people on ventilators is about 50%.[1]
"We should let corona run its course like every other flu year."
This is an invitation to let millions of people die.
COVID-19 is not "like every other flu". First, it's not a flu at all. Second, we don't know what the mortality rate of it is as there's not enough testing, and also many deaths from it seem to be happening but not being counted as COVID-19 deaths due to lack of testing and an overwhelmed health care system. Even morgues are getting overwhelmed. Gigantic convention centers and Central Park in NY are being converted in to makeshift hospitals. I've also read that death from COVID-19 is the leading cause of death now in the US.
On your last point, you do know that even a very low-lethality virus, spreading through a completely virgin population with no established immunity, will easily overwhelm a healthcare system used to working on tight margins, in very scary looking ways. This however doesn't speak of the virus's actual threat level in an absolute sense, and it leaves us far from the terrifying end-of-the-world hyperbole im seeing in this HN post so far.
Even at overwhelming healthcare, Covid has been far from nightmarish. In most of the world so far, things like what happened in New York, Italy, Spain, haven't been the case. Furthermore, even in Italy, New York, Spain and other places, evidence is clearly indicating a notable downward curve of saturation, already.
I can't speak for the near future and other potential changes, especially on the economic front (caused more than partly by a great deal of new rules that might actually be artificially making worse things that could have been handled much more calmly) but We are not in the apocalypse so far people, get over yourselves.
There are even several countries that haven't even applied quarantine models or lockdowns and they're doing okay so far despite being well into the general curve of the spread.
> If these people could hold out for a year or two
That's a pretty big if. Even in a perfect situation where you don't have to worry about getting money and food, prolonged isolation will cause a lot of issues. I understand you softened your statement with "or even some months", but IMO it's very difficult to "reprogram" people to avoid social contact and stay shut in.
Also, waiting out for a vaccine might not work, since there are no efficacy data at this point (perhaps some readouts on safety in about two months, but that's it). Drugs are IMO a far better bet (even though no one of them will work a miracle, and there will be many failures, for sure) for clinical management.
Lastly, my own experience with "holding out": six weeks of quarantine in Italy are absolutely wrecking my mind. There's no way I could "hold out" for a year.
It's a documentary about a relief mission that goes out into the Congo using disused railway tracks in order to feed 10s of thousands of Hutu refugees wandering around in the forest fleeing reprisals for the earlier genocide in Rawanda. They are starving to death and being chased by militia who are shooting at them from time to time from the forest. Absolutely no one except for the people in this relief mission cares about what happens to them.
The movie begins with the narrator saying that almost everyone you see in this film will be dead by the end of the movie. When I rewatched it lately, I wondered about those lines and what the future holds for us. What kind of documentary are we in? What if ending shelter in place fails. What if a deadlier strain shows up? What if this is the early days of WW III? All things to contemplate in my opinion, because I've been watching this since January and every week I expected things to get better and they've just been getting worse.