Re:What we can learn from the 1918 flu pandemic
by JamesBarney on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @01:38PM
(#22548001)
No one said it was going to be easy, or convenient. But most estimates say 70% of the population could become infected and with Italy's mortality rate of 6% that's 13.7 million deaths in the U.S. alone.
We had 6 weeks to prepare for this, and we did nothing, and we're still not doing nearly enough.
Types easy; is hard.
11 weeks ago was Christmas. How many Americans were overseas on holidays for Christmas? How many Americans with Chinese relatives were in China? How many Chinese students of American universities were home on break? Is flying Boston to Seattle meaningfully different than flying Boston to Toronto? If you halt international travel and close the borders, where do the stranded travelers now live? For how long? Who pays for it? Do they lose their jobs/have to quit college? On average, nearly half of international travelers are on their way home, not out. These are real people.
> But at the time everyone said that was nuts, you want to tank our economy over some virus that's barely even outside Wuhan!?
If you set the system parameters tightly enough to prevent the virus from leaving Wuhan, I think you're basically closing travel all the time. How many people get sick and die of random, novel things? How many of those have the theoretical potential to be silently but exponentially transmissible? How can you set a system tight enough to prevent all of them while having travel and commerce?
It seems quite possible that such a tight system would be a cure that's worse than the disease. I'm not suggesting that we're doing all that we can or that we shouldn't have taken some of today's steps last week, but I am saying that I think it's completely unrealistic to think we could prevent this entirely in any sane way.