The "disease" would be a lot, lot worse without the "cure" though. There'd still be really bad economic effects; there's no scenario in which everyone would just be going about doing business as usual pretending nothing is wrong while the news is reporting on catastrophically overwhelmed hospitals and how if you get to the point where you have serious trouble breathing, you're on your own and might easily die without a chance of being treated. People would be socially distancing of their own accord anyway, the main difference being this scenario has a much higher death toll since the distancing started way too late.
Well, the statistics are starting to show that if you're young and healthy, this is not much worse than the flu in terms of outcome. The hospitalization rate is also much lower than was reported earlier. Even just counting positive and confirmed test cases, this data is painting a pretty clear picture.
Here's the data out of new york city. You can see the chart showing hospitalizations and deaths per age. The trend is pretty biased towards old people. This makes me wonder if a more targeted response by the government would be better. The 2 trillion dollars might have been better spent.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
Well, spoiler alert, not everyone is young and healthy. In fact, the majority of Americans have at least one comorbidity for coronavirus.
> Covid for new york city has a death rate of about 75 per 100k.
So far. We're still experiencing hundreds of deaths per day in the city, significantly more than all other causes combined. Your analysis is vastly premature.
> So far. We're still experiencing hundreds of deaths per day in the city, significantly more than all other causes combined. Your analysis is vastly premature
Even if it's 150 per 100k, or even if it's 500 or 1000 per 100,000, is that too much? We need to establish an upper bound for the number of deaths we're willing to tolerate. It cannot be "zero". There is a balance between acceptable mortality and economic consequence that I fear few people are willing to discuss. The medical establishment's goal is to save as many lives as possible, and due to that strategy, they will go to any length to make that happen. I do not once see a medical professional saying "well we can't save all these lives because it would be too expensive". The concession seems to only go one direction: The economy must suffer at any and all cost to minimise mortality as far as possible.
So again, what is an acceptable mortality rate? 2%, 5%? A realistic upper bound that's a fair trade off between economic collapse and mortality rate needs to be decided.
I would say that doubling the death rate sounds bad. There is a point to be made that the main effect could be more on the side of reducing the high percentiles of lifespan rather than a long term increase in the death rate.
Also I think that setting an acceptable death rate is missing the point; depending on the illness anything between 0% to 100% is "acceptable" if there is nothing we can do. A more appropriate measure (IMHO) would be a something vaguely like lives_saved^2/effort.
In particular this need to consider the famous flattening the curve and the fact that for some categories of people the mortality rate can be very high.
On the other hand (and also on a more amoral side) it would be interesting how many alive man-months COVID-19 destroyed, as in how long was the average life expectancy of the people that died from it. I feel like this would be both harder to measure and more significant in term of sociological damage.
(in general this kind of conversations are hard as it is easy to insinuate that old people have less value which is both completely false and somewhat true, I personally do not possess the talent of walking this fine line of language)
>The economy must suffer at any and all cost to minimise mortality as far as possible.
Sounds good. After all, death is irreversible while economic damage is not.
>So again, what is an acceptable mortality rate?
I'd phrase it more like a flattened curve. Rather than focus on a specific mortality rate, the bound to reopen the economy should be something along the lines: when the curve is flattened enough so hospitals can deal with the incoming infection rate. So this would be local to an area (city size, maybe regional) and would also adjust based on local conditions. Infection rate low enough, open the economy a bit more. Infection rate trending up, close the economy a bit more.
If that doesn't result in economy numbers that make the billionaires happy, too god damn bad.
Maybe free market uber capitalistic unregulated invisible hand economic theory needs to be rewritten or adjusted for new realities, including a section on why exactly lower wage workers (retail, service) are expected to risk their lives so the economy built on top of them, the one in which the rewards mostly go elsewhere, can function.
