> Three million people dead would monkey wrench the economy no matter what.
Wouldn't that largely depend on the age of the victims? If the majority of victims are over retirement age, then this isn't likely to be true.
We've had nearly 1% of our population killed or wounded in a short period of time before, it's impact on the economy doesn't seem that obvious.
> 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives.
> 10 will have permanent lung damage.
The extent of these doesn't seem clear either, looking back to the previous SARS epidemic, there was significant ARDS recovery after diagnoses over a period of several years; however, with other certain pre-existing conditions the organ damage was permanent.
Even in those cases, the rates are significantly lower than this suggests. It seems like a lot of small sample size studies were used to generate these numbers. I don't doubt COVID is horrific and requires special care to address, but I don't see any benefit in exaggeration.. particularly if your goal is to address an already skeptical audience.
> If the majority of victims are over retirement age
No, it's not an election where the majority is the only thing that counts. And if younger people that are seriously ill are spending months debilitated (much of that hospitalized) where older people would die because they couldn't withstand the combination of the disease and the necessary supportive measures, taking more resources while losing more productivity for each young person that gets seriously ill, the fact that more old people are dying is even less relevant to the economic impact
Help me. I’m confused. Is the author saying that 1% of the people who are diagnosed with it will die? (That’s how I read it at first).
Or is he saying that 1% of everyone will die? Maybe that sounds like a dumb question, but I honestly don’t know if everyone is using the term “mortality rate” the way I think of it (which for me, until recently, was the first option above).
I guess I don’t even know if it makes a difference. Won’t we all be exposed to it anyway, if we haven’t already? Some of us may never know if we were, and others (sadly) will know straightaway.
If we can assume that nearly all of the USA (for instance) will be exposed and “catch” it, whether tested positive or not, then is the second version of “mortality rate”, in effect, the same as the first?
I’m only asking because I honestly don’t know and there is so much speculation and confusion out there. Hoping that someone on HN who is much experienced (and maybe in the world of medical stats) can clarify this for me.
There are two categories of ways this can resolve:
(1) We beat the coronavirus. People no longer regularly get infected.
(2) Coronavirus is here to stay. We'll all get it eventually just like we all eventually get colds and the flu.
I think it's pretty clear at this point that (1) isn't happening, at least absent a vaccine. If we do get a vaccine, it may be a polio/measles type situation where we can eliminate the disease, or it may be a flu-type situation where we all just get vaccinated every year.
So focusing on (2), where we all get the virus. We don't know the exact mortality rate for those infected. We don't know how the rate varies for re-infections.
We do know that the mortality rate is lower if the hospitals aren't full. So the shut downs may be logical in terms of keeping the infection rate low enough that the hospitals don't fill up, if we think it's worth it.
Whether the mortality rate benefits are worth the economic harms is another question, though.
Shutdowns also give the virus more time and incentive to evolve into more contagious variants with much milder symptoms. If we delay it long enough it can actually end up just being like the seasonal flu.
I know nothing about this, but from what you're saying it sounds like the more contagious a virus is, the milder it's symptoms are? Is this usually true for all viruses or did I just misread your comment
I just spent 5 minutes typing this up only to see your post.. thank you for also noticing. The other point made from this source (about permanent lung damage) is also wrong. I don’t see sources for the other numbers.
I agree never closing the economy would’ve been a total disaster. But the math here is bad.
Writing from Ireland, >20 cases a day (as of writing).
The lockdown here was a huge success.
But looking at the US numbers it seems that you got the worse outcome of lockdown/no-lockdown. Economical hit, plus number of cases are back on the rise due to people not isolating properly.
One could argue that for US lockdown was a mistake. Or at least very costly move to delay/prepare for peak infections.
> (out of a sample of 100 people) For every one person who dies:
* 19 more require hospitalization.
* 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives.
> One study published in March found that out of 416 hospitalized Covid-19 patients, 19% showed signs of heart damage.
Assuming 19 in 100 require hospitalization, according to the study: 19% of 19 will have heart damage or 3.61. Similar breakdown for other points.
Disclaimer: shutdown was the right call and the point is still valid with smaller numbers (they’re still huge). Just pointing it out.
What is the mortality rate of one of the more severe stains of the common cold or the flu? I'm sure we've had one of those that got to 0.5% or more in recent history?
Does that mean 0.5% is too low to shut everything down?
> What is the mortality rate of one of the more severe stains of the common cold or the flu?
One of the more severe strains of the flu? 10% globally (1918 H1N1 pandemic flu, estimated 500 million infected, 50 million killed), about 2% in the US.
> I'm sure we've had one of those that got to 0.5% or more in recent history?
No, and certainly not one that also was a global pandemic. I mean, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic swine flu had, in the US, about 0.02% mortality. Typical seasonal flu has a 0.1% mortality rate. The common cold is a syndrome caused by a variety of viruses (mostly rhinoviruses, but I think the next most common are coronaviruses.) If we had a relative of one of those that produced serious health impacts with any frequency, we wouldn't call it the common cold, but, e.g., COVID-19.
> Does that mean 0.5% is too low to shut everything down?
The mortality rate alone is not the measure. You need to consider the health system burden per infection (because if you saturate that system, mortality goes up, and not just for the infection causing the above-normal saturation.) And you need to consider how infectious the disease is, and what the transmission vectors are. And you need to consider the incidence of severe-but-nonfatal effects.
First, the flu doesn't have the other severe consequences outlined in the article.
Second, basically everyone except small children has had the flu, and has some immunity to it, while we're all "immunologically naive" vis-a-vis SARS-CoV-2.
Yeah but children are getting that inflammatory syndrome.. Thats pretty devastating. A life ruined but still alive can basically be counted as a death.
That has no bearing whatsoever on what I said. For small kids, the flu and COVID-19 are the same - they're encountering it for the first time, and are basically ok with it.
With adults, flu and COVID-19 are different: they have encountered the flu before, so it doesn't rampage through a population. COVID-19 does.
In other words: for flu, we basically have achieved some level of herd immunity already.
A quick google search will show many studies for covid mortality by age. The news media likes to tug on heart strings by pointing to kids or LGBT or black or whatever people affected by covid even though the numbers are miniscule.
I'm pretty sure the last time the flu got anywhere near a 0.5% IFR rate was the 1918 pandemic, which also devested the economy and resulted in shutdowns.
Covid-19 also is substantially more transmissible than flu.
There is nothing since 1918 that is comparable to where we are now, at least within the US context. Even the polio outbreaks (where in schools, movie theaters, pools and other features were shutdown to protect kids) don't really compare.
> It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.
I've only seen 2-2.5% cited as a CFR (case fatality rate) for 1918 influenza in the US, not the IFR (infection fatality rate). I don't know if those are assumed to be equivalent for are assumed to be retrospective analysis, but the CFR rate and IFR remain significantly different for COVID-19- ~4% for the all up US CFR rate and estimates anywhere from 0.1% to 1% for the COVID-19 IFR in the US.
> I've only seen 2-2.5% cited as a CFR (case fatality rate) for 1918 influenza in the US, not the IFR (infection fatality rate).
That may be the case; the places I've seen it cited it's clearly a US number, and it's usually alongside global infections and deaths, but the denominator of the US number has generally not been clear.
I was trying to make the point is that “1%” doesn’t sound like a lot, but is actually a huge number when you’re dealing with a commodity as supposedly important as human lives.
There are certainly all kinds of nuances and unknowns to the survival (and partially-survived) rates. Those idiots sayin “only 1% of blah blah” are the ones I take issue with.
Only about 1% of the people dying from covid are under 35. That's the big monkey wrench. If it was kids dying, I think the perception would be very different. There's other factors even more difficult to discuss than age.
The state is powerless to shape policy in a way that adequately fits the risk due to Western culture's focus on individual rights. It's up to us to shape our behavior. Are we adult enough to have that kind of conversation? I am doubtful.
Maybe this isn't an extremely mature question and is kind of a "gotcha!" question, but which one of your older relatives would you be willing to sacrifice for this?
Because if this is what we are talking about, then that question has to be thought of. It's might be easier when it's just "old people", but not when it actually affects your life
Another comparison I like to make - it's in the same ballpark as going on a Space Shuttle mission (2/135 = 1.5% crashed). Would you want to send your loved ones on a Space Shuttle ride (minus the yay, going to space thing)?
And that's not accounting for the massive side effects, or the fact that the fatality risk is much higher for vulnerable populations.
> This model assumes that the question’s hypothetical is correct and the fatality rate is 1%. It also assumes for the sake of argument 100% infection. (In reality, of course, neither of these is a perfect match to reality. The infection rate will never hit 100%, but the fatality rate in a widespread infection is likely to be greater than 1%, because health care services will be overwhelmed.)
Even those things wouldn’t shut down the country if it were, for example, sexually transmitted. The problem that you can contract it just by breathing in the wrong place at the wrong time is the real desaster. You wouldn’t want to take those odds even if it were 1% drop dead/99% completely fine.
Where are these rates coming from? They seem absolutely absurd. Are you suggesting that 17% of the US population is going to have permanent heart damage, and that 3% of the population is going to have a stroke, from contracting covid? That seems completely disconnected from reality.
3.5MM people in the US (at least) have already tested positive. Are you trying to imply that over 100,000 of these people have had a stroke?
More related to the article - isn't the latest IFR estimate from the CDC even less than 1%?
Not that I agree with the article, but a most of those numbers are the same people...
but yeah. US population, approx 330M, 59M of which are likely to be permanently fucked up by this virus and 3M permanently dead. not to mention the amount of people that died or got permanently damaged due to the fact that the hospitals were overloaded. They may not have been Covid patients but bleeding out from a undiscovered brain hemorrhage because the hospital was packed and the dr's overworked is still just as dead as 1% of covid sufferers...
How can people consider anything else? 1% excess mortality isn't acceptable. Hospitalising 5-10% is crippling hospitals. The ongoing health issues in 20% will haunt us for years after we have a vaccine and before we do, we face the prospect that post-exposure immunity might be measured in months.
Only idiots think this is worth ignoring.
Coincidentally, they're the same idiots that came in a day late and a dollar short when it was time to close borders and quarantine travelers. We could have stopped this.
Can't believe people still question the shutdowns as if there would be a scenario without. The people in power could choose between enforced but somewhat controlled shutdowns or the chaos shutdown. No shutdown was never an option. Most people would have long done their own "shutdown" completely voluntary. It would just be more chaotic and less effective and it would have needed way more people to die first.
In NYC, the shutdown was happened after rates of infection had already plummetted. Ill admit the data is really bad and hard to draw firm conclusions from; but in NYC - the only difference between now and when the shutdown happened is we have a lot of outdoor seating. Stores were requiring masks, limiting the number of concurrent shoppers, etc... They could have just closed indoor dining instead of shutting everything down.
> This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better. “They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”
Did you even read my post? Do you think people in Sweden still went to the the cinema watching 2h long movies with 200 other people in the same room when everyone around them closed everything? Do you think it needed a ban/regulation for that to stop? People in Sweden knew exactly what everyone around them did. Also Sweden death per million is one of the highest despite the fact they got it rather late and hospitals where officially never overwhelmed.
Japan and Korea have had experiences with SARS-CoV-1 back in the day. Therefore, using face masks in everyday life is ingrained in their culture by now. It would certainly be interesting to see data points from an alternate reality where the US population was consistent about wearing face masks in public.
I don't need to name them all, my post made a general statement that may or may not be true but certainly would apply to all countries with access to international news.
Wouldn't that largely depend on the age of the victims? If the majority of victims are over retirement age, then this isn't likely to be true.
We've had nearly 1% of our population killed or wounded in a short period of time before, it's impact on the economy doesn't seem that obvious.
> 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives. > 10 will have permanent lung damage.
The extent of these doesn't seem clear either, looking back to the previous SARS epidemic, there was significant ARDS recovery after diagnoses over a period of several years; however, with other certain pre-existing conditions the organ damage was permanent.
Even in those cases, the rates are significantly lower than this suggests. It seems like a lot of small sample size studies were used to generate these numbers. I don't doubt COVID is horrific and requires special care to address, but I don't see any benefit in exaggeration.. particularly if your goal is to address an already skeptical audience.