Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

[.We]

I made the mistake of opening reddit. Now I need to go find some eye bleach and an UV laser so I can give my large intestine a tan.

Today's Life Hack: Only take medical advice from certified health professionals.

 

[Megaolix]

Kindly drop Trump now before we bring out the hammer.

 

[Evillevi]

Why are people arguing that the quarantine will stop the virus? That's demonstrably untrue. At best it slows it down, and our halfassed way of doing it doesn't even seem to be doing that.

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tldr : Confounding variables (availability of medicine/treatment) affects the nature of the statistics (death rates with/without healthcare).

Death rates and overall damage are not stable numbers. Namely because panic and healthcare resources are the main contributing course to how badly or well outbreaks are handled.

Even if we make the assumption that the current infection and death rates are so small that they are not worth the lock down, it's easy to cast doubt since the rates are after we did the lockdown, and public warnings, and etc

 

[OverMaster]

Oooh, fresh news (like, literally just heard it on TV)- apparently studies are showing that this virus doesn't do well in the heat... we can expect it to weaken as summer approaches

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Tell that to Ecuador right now.

 

[MadGreenSon]

Oooh, fresh news (like, literally just heard it on TV)- apparently studies are showing that this virus doesn't do well in the heat... we can expect it to weaken as summer approaches.

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Tell that to Ecuador right now.

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It's also not really fresh news, that's been known for awhile now.

Also, the current long range forecast isn't looking like a hot year overall.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

This is a Natural Disaster. A big slow-moving one... act like it. The economy bounces back easily if there are PEOPLE with CONFIDENCE to bring it back. We see it after every natural disaster across the world. This is no different.

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That's not any kind of reasoning at all. People can make their own personal decisions on the risks they're willing to take with full awareness of their own age and illnesses. There would probably be a slowdown or smaller recession without, which is usually factored in the lockdown cost numbers, but to act like there's zero cost to all this is just absurd. Just go figure out what you think the death rate would be, how long you think they'd live if they hadn't caught it and divide the cost you think the lockdown incurred by the years left. By all means use a figure for the contributions of the people who die but don't include it quote it separately. I really, really, doubt it's a figure you or anyone would want to pay even for themselves and it will come out of other things that will cut people's lives short.

What you're talking about is a disease that can, with effort, be prevented from hurting others. It isn't like dealing with cancer because we have no choice... it's like intentionally exposing people to deadly carcinogens. And not even the way the tobacco companies did it by lying about evidence for decades- one way or another, people choose to smoke. No, this is more like dumping thousands of gallons of lead and mercury into the environment where it will inflict indiscriminate harm upon countless innocents.

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Let's be very clear here, I am not arguing videos games and waterparks are more important than Granpa. I am telling you there will be huge distributed costs to setting the economy on fire that are going to impact people's lives in very disproportionate ways. You won't be able to pay for healthy living or health costs. You'll suffer stress and associated medical problems from losing jobs and businesses and being shut in for weeks. You won't be able to achieve hopes and dreams. We're even getting reports of coming famines from the fallout now.

You aren't being clever and playing it safe by outright refusing to count the other pile of bodies and shattered dreams you'd be standing on top of by drawing this out. You're literally taking food from people's mouths, forcing the destitute into prostitution or high risk jobs and causing the deaths of everyone who can't afford medical treatments in the coming years. You need to account for this somehow and finding 'oh we're paying a million dollars a life year outright plus there's going to be massive suffering because of what we're doing' would mean this is worse on completely humanitarian grounds.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact deaths from cancer, obesity and murder aren't contagied quickly across the whole globe on some exponential rate, and instead are reliant on separate incidents that are not connected to each other in an international web that needs to be stopped?

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It's far from clear that it can be stopped. It can stay on surfaces, it could mutate and if the public testing studies are right way too many people caught it during lockdown for the measures to be effective. We'd have to keep this up for months or over a year for the vaccine development, and even the hardest lockdown supporters will cry uncle before that happens and we'd have a second cycle.

It needs to be done and needs to be done properly to slow it down to a point where it is Easier to weather. Not doing it properly basically just exposes you to more damage than otherwise.

Not that weathering it isn't costly and damaging... just LESS than not doing so. Because if you let it spread too much then it will hit a point where the hospital system cannot keep up. That is the point at which you will REALLY see deaths.

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Why does it need to be done to slow it down? The big justification has always been a ventilator shortage, but either they only work 1 time in 10 or they're actively harmful and have been killing people. These studies keep coming out, 8-9 in 10 of people on ventilators die anyway. If you think it's impossible to stop the spread and you can only manage it you need to make an effective case that death rates really go down with more focused treatment and just triaging these cases into palliative care would seriously shift the numbers. Then you need to ask yourself whether the cost for those marginal cases is in any way sane and would ever be considered if this wasn't a media circus.

didn't heed the warnings (the middle-east and Africa)

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Putting people in undeveloped countries into lockdown is just sadistic. If you're a day laborer who struggles to make enough money to eat at the best of times and your government can barely find it's own ass when it's not actively malevolent going into quarantine and trusting you'll be taken care of just isn't an option. The low age of the population means those countries won't be hit as hard anyway, the vast majority of people who need hospitalization are the elderly and the sick who're killed off by more urgent problems in those countries.

 

[MadGreenSon]

<snip>

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What's your threshold then? How many people are you willing to watch die in the name of the economy? Are you one of them? What about your nearest and dearest? Will you sacrifice them too?

 

[OverMaster]

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1252698777296797698.html

Fuck.

We had a good run. It was a pleasure, messiers and assorted ladies.

Putting people in undeveloped countries into lockdown is just sadistic. If you're a day laborer who struggles to make enough money to eat at the best of times and your government can barely find it's own ass when it's not actively malevolent going into quarantine and trusting you'll be taken care of just isn't an option. The low age of the population means those countries won't be hit as hard anyway, the vast majority of people who need hospitalization are the elderly and the sick who're killed off by more urgent problems in those countries.

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Speaking as someone living in a Third World country... NO.

'Low age of the population' is a meme, poor countries still have plenty of elders, many in positions that are vital to keep our societies as a whole running, and to 'make up' for that anyway, we have MANY more vulnerable people in the lower age ranges because we can't feed ourselves as well and we have lousier health systems to begin with. Much like with the warm weather, a younger population average has done jack, fuck, and shit of good for the likes of Ecuador.

 

[Derrandoo]

The economy is meant to be part of a productive society, not the point of one.

Right now we're aiming to reenact the Grapes of Wrath with a refusal of government to respond or do simple things to secure food/shelter/healthcare for its citizens because it ideologically conflicts with the way very wealthy people want reality to work.

There is more than enough housing and food in America and the idea that people will go hungry and "deserve" to be hungry in a pandemic where they don't have options is morally abhorrent.

"Reopening the economy" is pretty pointless, the globalized economy just got shanked by Corona and America is mainly service jobs, an economic reopening isn't going to let America manufacture its way out of a crisis. Realistically they're pressing for economic reopening so the states can start means testing unemployment again and denying money to out of work people, again for ideological reasons.

There is no real attempt to increase testing, contact tracing or support quarantined persons. Nobody in 'essential' positions is getting a raise, a union or a louder voice. All the protests by nurses and housing advocates have been ignored in favor of morons screaming to unleash a wave of death so they can get haircuts.

 

[OverMaster]

There is more than enough housing and food in America and the idea that people will go hungry and "deserve" to be hungry in a pandemic where they don't have options is morally abhorrent.

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With the caveat that most other countries in the world aren't as fortunate, and thus most of mankind actually faces a sadistic choice between succumbing to a plague and economic crisis and starvation. For America it's just a matter of their leaders' choice, but most of the rest of the world is truly fucked and the saddest part is the countries who could help aren't going to move a finger when they can't even bother to look after their own people.

 

[Aleh]

Fuck.

We had a good run. It was a pleasure, messiers and assorted ladies.

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12/addendum This Thread comes across as too pessimistic. There are ~75 vaccine candidates entering clinical trials. Hopefully some will be successful, and even if they "just" mitigate severe disease and require an annual booster that would still be a big a success

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[.We]

So someone decided to go interview whores about what impact the pandemic has had on their lives…

Turns out sex work will be the first part of economy to reopen. Apparently about a month of lockdown is enough to make customers stop give a shit about restrictions and come back.
Condoms and face masks have stay on though.
Competition is also increasing as recently laid off workers are going back to their old jobs to generate income.

In other news, remote sales of alcohol are up by a lot.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

Speaking as someone living in a Third World country... NO.

'Low age of the population' is a meme, poor countries still have plenty of elders, many in positions that are vital to keep our societies as a whole running, and to 'make up' for that anyway, we have MANY more vulnerable people in the lower age ranges because we can't feed ourselves as well and we have lousier health systems to begin with. Much like with the warm weather, a younger population average has done jack, fuck, and shit of good for the likes of Ecuador.

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The vast majority of Corona cases don't even reach a hospital or get tested, if you're in an economy where people are in literal food poverty you can't afford to overreact without a body count. Just look at the population pyramids for sub saharan africa vs a first world country like the united states. There's a genuine difference in the at risk demographics, it's not a meme. The problem of poorer nutrition definitely won't be helped by a lockdown.

What's your threshold then? How many people are you willing to watch die in the name of the economy? Are you one of them? What about your nearest and dearest? Will you sacrifice them too?

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You're seem to be thinking of this like a story, so to talk about it in those terms you are standing on top of a pile of dead bodies and human suffering that you're just refusing to account for. The consequences of a second great depression don't go away because you're focused on one problem in the world. The economic price is the starting point but it's a known one you need to address because it reflects a lot of the real problems that are going to come out of this. Granpa's pension is fucked as much as your job so he has to go into a shittier care home where he can only stare at a gray wall all day, your sister can't afford to move your nephew out of the bad neighborhood where he gets knifed, that neighborhood is far worse off than it had to have been because everyone's parents lost their jobs and welfare had to be cut to pay for the huge amount of debt the government ran up.

Once you account for the ages and conditions of the people at risk and the long term economic costs of this we can run up a cash cost of $1,000,000 per year of life saved in cash terms. Assuming this works and ends in a month. If it drags on longer, didn't work, or we cry uncle before a 100% effective vaccine or treatment appears the predictable costs get even more skewed. Then you get to have the fun of mental conditions, long term unemployment, lower incomes, lower income communities, poorer healthcare, famines or any other problems this causes that you need to account for when deciding if this is right or wrong.

Even if you refuse to even think about those problems you still need to draw your line proportionately. There's no way you get to save all the 1-2 million people at risk no matter how long you extend the lockdown, at some point you have to just admit a number is good enough. Would a 50% effective treatment program be enough? If so, why would 500,000 to 1,000,000 deaths be good enough for you? What about 90%? If it took 18 months of this for a vaccine that saved everyone but there were 30 million plus worldwide dead in famine, a second great depression and 30% unemployment would you reconsider the costs then?

Personally I think most people will. The time required, if the antibody testing isn't accurate and we're not pretty much at herd immunity already, is just too long. Eventually the pain will outweigh the fear and we'll open back up and bite the bullet, making the entire expense if not worthless than far less than promised.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

To all the people who think I'm being heartless here you really need to run out the numbers we're seeing to a year or longer. A ~30% recession is a pretty standard prediction for this quarter in the US and the numbers are similar elsewhere in the world. Right now most people are predicting around a ~5% annual fall assuming the lockdown doesn't go on much longer.

Compare that to the Great Depression and the Great Recession, using the US as an example since I haven't seen handy lockdown recession worldwide figures yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression_in_the_United_States

Between 1929 and 1933, U.S. GDP fell around 30%

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession_in_the_United_States

According to the Department of Labor, roughly 8.7 million jobs (about 7%) were shed from February 2008 to February 2010, and real GDP contracted by 4.2% between Q4 2007 and Q2 2009, making the Great Recession the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

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Dragging this out like people want would take a great recession and turn it into a great depression, which will effect people at the bottom. People won't be able to pay rent and get evicted. Their employers will give them worse pay and conditions with all the competition for years after the event even if they get jobs at all. The government will have to make cuts, probably with inflation, that'll include benefits, welfare and other social spending these people will have to depend on. A lot of the poverty and unemployment will become structural. I'm not necessarily arguing against you if you say "well we should just ban rent until this is over", "the government should give everyone jobs after" or anything like that but realistically all of those proposals are massive cultural shifts we can't possibly expect to happen when deciding "yes" or "no" to this lockdown. All we get to decide is whether we're supporting open or close with our voices, and we need to seriously think about which is better or worse for us.

 

[AllyDoodle]

Kindly drop Trump now before we bring out the hammer.

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Sorry for bringing it up in the first place. It wasn't intended to start a debate, just point how fuck stupid doing something like that would be.

 

[evildice]

To all the people who think I'm being heartless

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They seem to have been saying you're brainless, not heartless.

To make a decision about the economics, you would need to compare the economic consequences of an unmitigated plague against the consequences of a mitigated one. What you're doing is comparing a mitigated plague against last year, when there was no plague.

Removing the mitigation won't remove the plague, and an unmitigated plague tends to have worse consequences.

 

[MadGreenSon]

To all the people who think I'm being heartless

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You're not heartless, you're indoctrinated. Or maybe stupid. Despite your shallow pretense of intellectual rigor, all you're really doing is making a display of servile groveling at the feet of people who don't care if you live or die as long as you do what they want you to for ideology's sake.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

They seem to have been saying you're brainless, not heartless.

To make a decision about the economics, you would need to compare the economic consequences of an unmitigated plague against the consequences of a mitigated one. What you're doing is comparing a mitigated plague against last year, when there was no plague.

Removing the mitigation won't remove the plague, and an unmitigated plague tends to have worse consequences.

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The plague isn't what you think it is. I've said this repeatedly the 3% morality WHO figure is for confirmed tested cases which the experts admit is small percentage of the total heavily skewed to hospitalised cases. Realistically you're looking at ~1 in 200 who could die, heavily tilted to the elderly and sick, with an average life expectancy of maybe ~11 years. 95% of the population doesn't need to be concerned about this, the people at risk can be isolated for a fraction of the cost, and these are the people who die in flu season anyway. People with pre existing conditions and the retired aren't the biggest economic contributors here. You don't get to just throw them into the calculation blindly assuming they are and there are huge externalities I'm ignoring. There are huge actual consequences for the young and poor that need to be thought about, and this isn't going to do any favors for the elderly who depend on fixed incomes either. Pensions will be slashed by the economic crash, state benefits will be slashed by the coming austerity and savings will be slashed in value by inflation.

You're not heartless, you're indoctrinated. Or maybe stupid. Despite your shallow pretense of intellectual rigor, all you're really doing is making a display of servile groveling at the feet of people who don't care if you live or die as long as you do what they want you to for ideology's sake.

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You're just continuing to refuse to answer basic questions, and if people keep thinking like you it's completely random when the pain outweighs the fear. You need to decide what cost is too much? A billion dollars a life year? How many saved is enough? 80% of at risk people? Refusing to ask doesn't make you a better person it just means you never find out how big of a monster you are because you ignore the steaming pile of bodies at your feet.

Let's say 30 million people die in famine, a billion are unemployed, 100 million homeless, global living standards are down 10% and 50 million die of inferior healthcare of all ages, because of this or 40 million of the elderly die of corona. What's better? You've clearly decided already and if you just refuse to think about it it doesn't change the actual effects of your actions to anyone.

 

[wichajster]

And yes, it is possible to reach point where overall damage from continued lockdown will be greater than damage from not continuing lockdowns.

I would be interested in a decent comparison, sadly data is not clear at all. Hopefully that will clarify in a near future.

 

[MadGreenSon]

The plague isn't what you think it is. I've said this repeatedly the 3% morality WHO figure is for confirmed tested cases which the experts admit is small percentage of the total heavily skewed to hospitalised cases. Realistically you're looking at ~1 in 200 who could die, heavily tilted to the elderly and sick, with an average life expectancy of maybe ~11 years. 95% of the population doesn't need to be concerned about this, the people at risk can be isolated for a fraction of the cost, and these are the people who die in flu season anyway. People with pre existing conditions and the retired aren't the biggest economic contributors here. You don't get to just throw them into the calculation blindly assuming they are and there are huge externalities I'm ignoring. There are huge actual consequences for the young and poor that need to be thought about, and this isn't going to do any favors for the elderly who depend on fixed incomes either. Pensions will be slashed by the economic crash, state benefits will be slashed by the coming austerity and savings will be slashed in value by inflation.



You're just continuing to refuse to answer basic questions, and if people keep thinking like you it's completely random when the pain outweighs the fear. You need to decide what cost is too much? A billion dollars a life year? How many saved is enough? 80% of at risk people? Refusing to ask doesn't make you a better person it just means you never find out how big of a monster you are because you ignore the steaming pile of bodies at your feet.

Let's say 30 million people die in famine, 100 million homeless and 50 million die of inferior healthcare of all ages, because of this or 40 million of the elderly die of corona. What's better? You've clearly decided already and if you just refuse to think about it it doesn't change the actual effects of your actions to anyone.

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You're a true believer, I get it. But continuing to try and sell the same bullshit isn't going to work because all you've got is... basically just parroting other people's soundbites badly. I mean, you're not even taking into account your own bullshit numbers. You are apparently willing to watch forty million people die to "save the economy" without even taking into account what you would do with forty million dead bodies, much less all the other shit that would happen as you rack up an appalling death toll in the name of other people's profits.

Also, those forty million would actually make sure that shit would be worse because guess what? No one is just going to stand around and dispassionately watch them die, none of this shit happens in a vacuum no matter how hard you wish it to.

 

[wichajster]

You need to decide what cost is too much? A billion dollars a life year?

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More than 80 000$ / QUALY? Burt it depends heavily on opportunity costs (how this money would be used otherwise).

BTW, it is an interesting though experiment: how much I would be willing to pay to get life 1 day longer? 1 day longer in life of my mother? It calculates up to surprisingly low amount per year (or surprisingly high amount per day/hour). Anyway, practical conclusion is that I need to call my family.

As lets admit, noone cares what I think about lockdown.

How many saved is enough? 80% of at risk people?

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I would not go with % - that is pointless. For avoidable deaths I would want much higher % than for ones that are not avoidable or extremely hard to avoid.

For example any deaths caused by surgeons not following basic checklists are unacceptable. Things like operating wrong patient, operating on a wrong side (removing left lung instead of a right lung etc), not washing hands in XXI century etc are all things that still keep happening. Deaths due to random unexpected and undetectable and unpredictable and untreatable aneurysms are more acceptable.

Realistically you're looking at ~1 in 200 who could die, heavily tilted to the elderly and sick, with an average life expectancy of maybe ~11 years

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Assuming that your numbers of people saved by lockdown are correct and taking 80 000$ / QUALY, reduced to half ("elderly and sick" part).

US population: 300*1000*1000
lost years: /200*11
QUALY per lost year: 0.5*80000

300*1000*1000/200*11*0.5*80000=660 000 000 000$

So "reopen economy during COVID" would need to demonstrate 660 billion over "keep lockdown going on".

And you need to compare "normal economy + COVID + lockdown" with "normal economy + COVID" not with normal economy.

And both my QUALY and your death rate are likely to be wildly different numbers in other estimates.

 

[Evillevi]

The plague isn't what you think it is. I've said this repeatedly the 3% morality WHO figure is for confirmed tested cases which the experts admit is small percentage of the total heavily skewed to hospitalised cases. Realistically you're looking at ~1 in 200 who could die, heavily tilted to the elderly and sick, with an average life expectancy of maybe ~11 years. 95% of the population doesn't need to be concerned about this, the people at risk can be isolated for a fraction of the cost, and these are the people who die in flu season anyway. People with pre existing conditions and the retired aren't the biggest economic contributors here. You don't get to just throw them into the calculation blindly assuming they are and there are huge externalities I'm ignoring. There are huge actual consequences for the young and poor that need to be thought about, and this isn't going to do any favors for the elderly who depend on fixed incomes either. Pensions will be slashed by the economic crash, state benefits will be slashed by the coming austerity and savings will be slashed in value by inflation

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Again, the 3% Who mortality figures is before it has been reliably screened for confounding variables. Everything from the requirement to achieving immunity to the actual mortality if left out of control is not currently known or reliably verified.

What this means is that all leaders are essentially making a bet as to whether the virus would blow out of control . Those who aren't taking the risk are locking down the country and those that aren't are letting it roam free.

Note that this is the observation from Malaysia, where most the Ministry Of Health advocate for extended contact tracing in part due to your reasoning, namely that the people most at risk ccan self isolate and paying them a UBI for doing so is cheaper then locking down the country. However the PM decided, hey, I'm not taking the risk of becoming the next Italy and subsequently lockdown the country.

Admittedly even if the MOH recommended actions were followed, it would only have bought us about two weeks before the growth becomes exponential as it spreads to the idiots.

:Fake edit:
On the topic of Sweden, note that Sweden is functionally under a soft lockdown, its just that due to the farrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr higher education and critical thinking levels in their populace, they can rely on their population from doing something stupid, ala our malaysian idiots.

 

[Germtheory3Z]

You're a true believer, I get it. But continuing to try and sell the same bullshit isn't going to work because all you've got is... basically just parroting other people's soundbites badly. I mean, you're not even taking into account your own bullshit numbers. You are apparently willing to watch forty million people die to "save the economy" without even taking into account what you would do with forty million dead bodies, much less all the other shit that would happen as you rack up an appalling death toll in the name of other people's profits.

Also, those forty million would actually make sure that shit would be worse because guess what? No one is just going to stand around and dispassionately watch them die, none of this shit happens in a vacuum no matter how hard you wish it to.

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You've ignored the World Food Programme's predictions of 30 million deaths from starvation due to the economic consequences.

The WFP chief - who has just recovered from Covid-19 - began his Security Council briefing by saying "excuse me for speaking bluntly." There is no blunting what could happen in a world facing - even before this global health crisis - what David Beasley called the worst humanitarian catastrophe since the Second World War.

In an interview, he also expressed fear that 30 million people, and possibly more, could die in a matter of months if the UN does not secure more funding and food. But this is also a world where donors are reeling from the steep financial cost of their own Covid-19 crises.

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You've also ignored the loss of life from poverty. Just go look for anything on the subject, if there aren't hard numbers on the cash element (because sometimes it's the same people who make bad decisions about their health and their finances) you have to admit we're dealing with a genuine issue here.

https://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap-us-0411

Poverty in the U.S. is often associated with deprivation, in areas including housing, employment, and education. Now a study co-authored by two MIT researchers has shown, in unprecedented geographic detail, another stark reality: Poor people live shorter lives, too.

More precisely, the study shows that in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.

This eye-opening gap is also growing rapidly: Over roughly the last 15 years, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women who are among the top 5 percent of income earners in America, but by just 0.32 and 0.04 years for men and women in the bottom 5 percent of the income tables.

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There are countless sources out there and the idea that a great depression wouldn't cost hundreds of millions of years of life even in the developed world is absurd to me. 'The economy' isn't something for rich people, they're the ones who'll be least effected and probably turn a big profit from all of this long term by buying in while the market is cheap. It's the poorer people who'll lose their savings, homes and jobs and have measurably worse lives.

You can go take a look at how this is hitting poorer countries if it's going to be more impactful to you. The same problems can exist in the west in lesser severity.

More than 80 000$ / QUALY? Burt it depends heavily on opportunity costs (how this money would be used otherwise).

BTW, it is an interesting though experiment: how much I would be willing to pay to get life 1 day longer? 1 day longer in life of my mother? It calculates up to surprisingly low amount per year (or surprisingly high amount per day/hour). Anyway, practical conclusion is that I need to call my family.

As lets admit, noone cares what I think about lockdown.

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There is a big marginal difference between days and years for me too when I think about it that way. It's mostly so I can have time to plan and say goodbyes though, not really because I want to live the day itself. By preference for my own sake I'd prefer to die suddenly and will probably have do not resuscitate orders put on me when I get to that age.

I would not go with % - that is pointless. For avoidable deaths I would want much higher % than for ones that are not avoidable or extremely hard to avoid.

For example any deaths caused by surgeons not following basic checklists are unacceptable. Things like operating wrong patient, operating on a wrong side (removing left lung instead of a right lung etc), not washing hands in XXI century etc are all things that still keep happening. Deaths due to random unexpected and undetectable and unpredictable and untreatable aneurysms are more acceptable.

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In this case I mean % of people slated to die of Corona, like if there was a solution that would save X% of them and doom the others at what point would the problem be small enough to tolerate. Pretty much everyone would agree to 99.9% so where would the line be? Then I would argue that proves X times the current costs is too much to spend as well if that's the proportional value.

As for medical errors there's definitely an interesting argument to be made by people involved about the trade offs between overwork and overcredentialism. If we lowered the qualification requirements, and some pay, for the field to have more hands available would that be a net benefit? I've heard of some zaney studies of just having mandatory checklists for each operations actually cutting deaths by medical errors massively too.

Assuming that your numbers of people saved by lockdown are correct and taking 80 000$ / QUALY, reduced to half ("elderly and sick" part).

US population: 300*1000*1000
lost years: /200*11
QUALY per lost year: 0.5*80000

300*1000*1000/200*11*0.5*80000=660 000 000 000$

So "reopen economy during COVID" would need to demonstrate 660 billion over "keep lockdown going on".

And you need to compare "normal economy + COVID + lockdown" with "normal economy + COVID" not with normal economy.

And both my QUALY and your death rate are likely to be wildly different numbers in other estimates.

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If you'll take 1 in 200 as a base rate for the entire population (maybe half infected and maybe 1% fatality rate with maybe 11 years life expectancy) then yeah I think we're way too high even before we try to account for other QUALY problems caused as a result.

The current federal stimulus act is costing ~2.3 Trillion. I'd assume state spending on lockdown measures will add up to some substantial fraction of that but I can't find what it would be. The US economy is ~21 Trillion. The GDP would've gone up by ~2.5% in 2020, probably, and now will go down by at least 6%. Not all of that cost is going to be upfront, since GDP doesn't leap back up immediately. It took until 2011 to get back to the 2007 peak after the recession, and a few years after that to make up for the lost growth. I've seen ~10 Trillion thrown around and ~15 Trillion wouldn't be unthinkable, but it'd be 6% of 21 Trillion for 1.3 Trillion this year and several times that in total. We could call it ~4.7 Trillion for ease of calculation.

In total I'd put ~$7 Trillion up as the total cost, assuming the effects of the stimulus are accounted for in GDP and we only need to account for the bill. Unless 90% of that was unavoidable it's significantly over 660 billion.

The reason I oppose the lockdown so strongly is because I'm not seeing any arguments that that would be the total cost to actually save those lives. A lot of them could be saved by less drastic strategies and the costs could extend to several times that if the lockdown draws on for several more months. A marginal cost over a million dollars per life year isn't unthinkable if the louder alarmist voices are listened to, and then we have the fun of trying to add up the life years lost as a result of the poverty, social isolation and stress.

Again, the 3% Who mortality figures is before it has been reliably screened for confounding variables. Everything from the requirement to achieving immunity to the actual mortality if left out of control is not currently known or reliably verified.

What this means is that all leaders are essentially making a bet as to whether the virus would blow out of control . Those who aren't taking the risk are locking down the country and those that aren't are letting it roam free.

Note that this is the observation from Malaysia, where most the Ministry Of Health advocate for extended contact tracing in part due to your reasoning, namely that the people most at risk ccan self isolate and paying them a UBI for doing so is cheaper then locking down the country. However the PM decided, hey, I'm not taking the risk of becoming the next Italy and subsequently lockdown the country.

Admittedly even if the MOH recommended actions were followed, it would only have bought us about two weeks before the growth becomes exponential as it spreads to the idiots.

:Fake edit:
On the topic of Sweden, note that Sweden is functionally under a soft lockdown, its just that due to the farrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr higher education and critical thinking levels in their populace, they can rely on their population from doing something stupid, ala our malaysian idiots.

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It'll be interesting to see the results between different countries at the end of this, but one argument that might be made for social distancing is 'smaller' infections even if they do still occur. This is just from a blog post but it's an interesting idea that seems to have some evidence backing it up.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/know-when-to-fold-em.html

Many studies have found big effects of initial virus dose on many outcomes. For covid19 we know that patients with more viruses in their blood (higher "viral load") show more severe symptoms. And for other viruses we see that such patients also die more often. But in terms of the most direct sort of evidence, I've only been able to find these empirical studies connecting initial virus dose size to human death rates:

1. Deliberate infection with low doses of smallpox is reported to have cut death rates of infected from 30% to 1-2%, or from 1 in 5-6 to 1 in 50.
2. Among 126 African kids infected with measles, the first in a family to get it had a 14x lower death rate relative to other kids in the same families. Presumably that first kid gets it from outside the family, via a low dose, while other kids in the same family are infected at home, via a larger dose.
3. In a Hong Kong high-rise, one resident infected many others with SARS, possibly via aerosols, but those who lived physically closer got a higher dose, and saw 3x the death rate.
4. This New Yorker article mentions 2 more cases, but I can't yet find cites to studies.

The first case, of a deliberate low dose infection, saw effects in the range 8-30x, while the other two cases of observing a natural difference in dose saw effects of 3x and 14x, giving only lower bounds on deliberate dose effects. So while we can't at all be sure of the deliberate dose effect for Covid19, we have good reason to expect it to be at least a factor of 3. And maybe a factor of 30 or more.

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[Evillevi]

It'll be interesting to see the results between different countries at the end of this, but one argument that might be made for social distancing is 'smaller' infections even if they do still occur. This is just from a blog post but it's an interesting idea that seems to have some evidence backing it up.

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TLDR so you dont have to wonder.

1. Viral Load is not relevant to teh decision making process since it's the mutation rate that is more of a concern. In 99.999999% of all virus and bacteria that infects humans, their charecteristics is such that mutations will make it more benign and less lethal since it spreads the virus out faster if the patient was alive. Corvid 19 is the 0.001% where since the symptors occur after the infection period, there's less pressure for mutations to be benign and an unquantifiable risk of more lethal mutations. So even if the true deathrate is 1/1000 right now, the no lockdown strat incurs a real possibility of more lethal mutations or more immunity dodging variants.
1.1 This is why predicting herd immunity through doing nothing is a near full proof strat for the other "pandemics" of our time (Sars, Mers, Swine flu) as they were heavily pressured to benign mutations.

edit: 1.2 C19 can be potentially more dangerous as time goes on due to immunity dodging mutations preventing herd or actual immunity.

2. One of the big problems with implementing or not implementing lockdown is that the effect is , on paper, inversely proportional to the education* of the people. TLDR the smater your population, the less you need a lockdown
2.1 Or as my father puts it, it's not relevant to discuss other countries methods if they aren't applicable to our country **.

*Education being both knowledge and critical thinking skills.
**Being that a majority portion of Malaysian population is non-educated, extremist, loyalist, or nationalist to the point of idiocy

 

[MadGreenSon]

You've ignored the World Food Programme's predictions of 30 million deaths from starvation due to the economic consequences.

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Not really. That's also still ten million fewer deaths than you claim your preferred method will cause.

 

[TanaNari]

And you're also not considering the non-virus benefits of the lockdown.

Murder and general violent crime rates are down by double digit rates across a great majority of the western world... a trend which might actually save more lives than are being lost to Wuhan Flu.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marley...p-amid-the-coronavirus-pandemic/#1d39c1e7311e

That one's also kind enough to point out, for those environmentalists out there, that this is amazing for the planet. Human-generated pollution hasn't been this low since the 1800s. It's also showing how quickly the planet can bounce back, which is great news and a massive scientific boon.

And the reduction in car accidents... in California alone it has already saved about a billion taxpayer dollars, plus all the life and suffering.

https://www.latimes.com/california/...s-cut-traffic-crashes-in-half-saved-1-billion

Then there's the as-yet impossible to calculate impact upon other diseases that cause serious harm or death. Here's a fun statistic: daylight savings time, and its impact on sleep patterns costs about half a billion dollars per year in America.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillma...me-is-a-434m-problem-we-could-easily-fix.html

Now, just imagine how many people are catching up on their sleep during this period.


Hell, as a spitball number, I'd say we have about six months before the harm to human life caused by the economic damage outweighs the harm to human life caused by modern lifestyles, even if the outbreak never happened in the first place.

Now, after a year or so the damage would no doubt reach unacceptable levels, but we're nowhere near that point as of yet.

And that's *before* factoring in the risks of the virus, one way or another.


TL;DR? We should do this more often.

 

[evildice]

That one's also kind enough to point out, for those environmentalists out there, that this is amazing for the planet. Human-generated pollution hasn't been this low since the 1800s. It's also showing how quickly the planet can bounce back, which is great news and a massive scientific boon.

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2020 - First year Earth Day actually was.

 

[Derrandoo]

South Korea actually elected their Green New Deal party, which would be nice if everyone started turning from 100% exploitation and the "infinite growth!" economic model to trying to build the future we can actually survive with.

 

[OverMaster]

Then there's the as-yet impossible to calculate impact upon other diseases that cause serious harm or death. Here's a fun statistic: daylight savings time, and its impact on sleep patterns costs about half a billion dollars per year in America.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillma...me-is-a-434m-problem-we-could-easily-fix.html

Now, just imagine how many people are catching up on their sleep during this period.

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This one I wouldn't be so sure about. Collective stress must be doing a fair number on a lot of people's sleeping patterns across the world.

I know I haven't been sleeping as well as I used to since this began. But I admit it's very difficult keeping numbers on this kind of data right now, one way or the other.

 

[evildice]

But I admit it's very difficult keeping numbers on this kind of data right now, one way or the other.

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Google, Microsoft, and Apple could probably tell you if your sleep pattern changed.

That'd be an interesting study, presuming the oligarchs allowed it.