Re:Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid...
by paulmd on Thursday March 12, 2020 @11:43AM
(#22557984)
> The economic cost of the first scenario (numerous deaths in peak period) would likely be the highest with the impact both on workforce and market sentiment
The deaths from Coronavirus are mostly not people of working age. The death rate for 50-59 is around 1%, below that it drops to 0.2%. For seniors it's as high as 20%.
If you want to be cold-blooded about it, there is certainly a case to be made for shrugging and plowing on, as that will minimize the duration of the impact (quarantines, etc) and the people who will die are mostly not economically productive.
To be even more crass - before long we will probably be in a triage situation where there are more cases than resources available to treat. There are only about 20 full-service respirators per 100k people, around 62k nationwide, and many of those are already in use (people will still get in car accidents, have strokes, get meningitis, whatever). We can't treat everybody. So who gets it? Little Timmy who has a long and productive life ahead of him, or great-aunt Susan who's 75 and barely gets around anymore?
At a first approximation there will be around 100 times as many seniors who need treatment as youngs. From a social perspective it's pretty obvious that treatment should be prioritized for those younger patients.
(reminder that not making a choice is still making a choice, whether that means treatment ends up being first-come first-serve or a financial/insurance basis. Triage sucks, but you have to prioritize your resources somehow or other, the whole problem is there is not enough treatment to go around.)
The deaths from Coronavirus are mostly not people of working age. The death rate for 50-59 is around 1%, below that it drops to 0.2%. For seniors it's as high as 20%.
If you want to be cold-blooded about it, there is certainly a case to be made for shrugging and plowing on, as that will minimize the duration of the impact (quarantines, etc) and the people who will die are mostly not economically productive.
To be even more crass - before long we will probably be in a triage situation where there are more cases than resources available to treat. There are only about 20 full-service respirators per 100k people, around 62k nationwide, and many of those are already in use (people will still get in car accidents, have strokes, get meningitis, whatever). We can't treat everybody. So who gets it? Little Timmy who has a long and productive life ahead of him, or great-aunt Susan who's 75 and barely gets around anymore?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215
At a first approximation there will be around 100 times as many seniors who need treatment as youngs. From a social perspective it's pretty obvious that treatment should be prioritized for those younger patients.
(reminder that not making a choice is still making a choice, whether that means treatment ends up being first-come first-serve or a financial/insurance basis. Triage sucks, but you have to prioritize your resources somehow or other, the whole problem is there is not enough treatment to go around.)