I’ve participated in Homeland Security pandemic exercises. One in particular had a R0 of about 2, and a death rate of 1.3%, with a hospitalization rate of 10%, and and acute care rate of 3%. All numbers lower than CoVID-19.
What happened in the exercise was that all hospitals got over run, very quickly, it took months for the infection rates to flatten.
Nobody could get into a hospital and get any proper care, entire families started dying, the death rate jumped up to almost 12%. Remember the calculated death rate is based on proper care. Police, Fire, EMS, got hit hard and they all walked off the job.
Nursing homes, assisted living facilities had death rates of almost 75%, (we’re starting to see 50% now).
Hospital workers started walking off the job. The economy didn’t slow down the economy flew into the ground at 500mph and exploded in billions of tiny pieces. The country went into immediate shortages of everything, which didn’t really matter because basically everyone stopped going to work.
When you might get sick and you know you can’t get care and without care you have a 12 in 100 chance of dying you can’t get people to leave their house, for any reason. People start dying home alone.
The death rate gets even higher because of food shortages, prescription drug shortages, and underlying health conditions fuel the fire. Power disruptions, water, sewage issue because no one is working. Crime becomes a problem, because a) the police aren’t working and b) people get desperate.
Once things start to unravel you can’t simply re-ravel things.
In a normal flu season about 40 Million people get infected, with 30-67K dead a year spread out over 6 months.
If we respond to COVID-19 like we do with the flu, we could see 150-200 million infected because it spreads more easily, those numbers would overwhelm the country, maybe have 20-35 Million dead, the economy might stop for a year or two, or three or four.
We don’t know if infection confers immunity, what happens if it doesn’t? What if getting it makes you more susceptible to a second and worse infection? What if we can’t develop a vaccine?
I agree with your point in general, but this claim is overblown:
> If we respond to COVID-19 like we do with the flu, we could see 150-200 million infected because it spreads more easily, those numbers would overwhelm the country, maybe have 20-35 Million dead
Even without any medical treatment at all, the death rate from COVID-19 is much lower than 13%. It might even be below 1%, once you factor in all the asymptomatic cases that we're only just starting to discover from blood antibody testing. So we're still talking about millions of deaths, which would be absolutely horrible enough in its own right, but we're not looking at double digit death numbers. COVID-19 fortunately isn't that deadly. Other diseases are though ... so in a way, as bad as this seems, we did still get somewhat lucky.
Your exercises were worthless because they were based on the assumption epidemiology is usefully correct, and it's clearly not.
I mean, I wonder how you reach the conclusions you do? Just read your own post back to yourself. You say the numbers in SARS-COV-2 are worse than for your simulation yet the outcomes observed in reality are empty hospitals that need to furlough workers because they are so underworked. Reality has disproven the simulations, but it sounds a lot like you're concluding reality is wrong?
"empty hospitals that need to furlough workers because they are so underworked"
This seems to be a meme, but I think it started with misinterpretation of elective procedures being cancelled and employees that couldn't be repurposed being furloughed. It doesn't make any sense to equate this with hospital resources in general being plentiful. The point of no elective procedures is that some resources are freed up. Bottlenecks aren't applicable to everything equally.
There's no mis-interpretation. All those procedures were cancelled because of a belief that hospitals would be overflowing and every bed would be needed. Clearly those predictions were well wide of the mark.
What happened in the exercise was that all hospitals got over run, very quickly, it took months for the infection rates to flatten.
Nobody could get into a hospital and get any proper care, entire families started dying, the death rate jumped up to almost 12%. Remember the calculated death rate is based on proper care. Police, Fire, EMS, got hit hard and they all walked off the job.
Nursing homes, assisted living facilities had death rates of almost 75%, (we’re starting to see 50% now).
Hospital workers started walking off the job. The economy didn’t slow down the economy flew into the ground at 500mph and exploded in billions of tiny pieces. The country went into immediate shortages of everything, which didn’t really matter because basically everyone stopped going to work.
When you might get sick and you know you can’t get care and without care you have a 12 in 100 chance of dying you can’t get people to leave their house, for any reason. People start dying home alone.
The death rate gets even higher because of food shortages, prescription drug shortages, and underlying health conditions fuel the fire. Power disruptions, water, sewage issue because no one is working. Crime becomes a problem, because a) the police aren’t working and b) people get desperate.
Once things start to unravel you can’t simply re-ravel things.
In a normal flu season about 40 Million people get infected, with 30-67K dead a year spread out over 6 months.
If we respond to COVID-19 like we do with the flu, we could see 150-200 million infected because it spreads more easily, those numbers would overwhelm the country, maybe have 20-35 Million dead, the economy might stop for a year or two, or three or four.
We don’t know if infection confers immunity, what happens if it doesn’t? What if getting it makes you more susceptible to a second and worse infection? What if we can’t develop a vaccine?
You’ll be gambling with a lot of lives.