Its crazy to pull the handbrake on the economy. 99% of the people that died were going to be death in a year or 2 anyway.

Have you heard about that school class full of 6 years old kids in Italy that died last a week?

Didn't happen but when it happens we do not have this options anymore. Old people die and thats life.

From a purely selfish point of view, assuming the disease will be a minor inconvenience to you because you’re young and healthy, there are other things to consider:

- what happens to your (presumably much older) parents when they get sick? Death is a very real outcome there

- what happens when you have a car crash and need intensive care but all hospital beds are full and there are also younger patients than you to treat with a better outcome? You’re triaged lower priority and may not get the care you’d normally get or survive at all

For perspective, there really aren’t that many ICU hospital beds altogether because the usual number of people who need intensive care at any given point in a city of millions is in the hundreds (maybe low thousand?) Once the exponential nature of the epidemics hits and there are thousands of people who need care right now on top of the usual load, then it’s like in Italy where some are left to die just because choices must be made and there are either healthier victims with better prognosis.

But aside from that, we need the capability to hit the pause button on the economy during similar future events. What if for example a more extreme one in the future threatened to kill 10% of the population and required a significantly longer lockdown. By having a dry-run (in comparison) now, we might be much more prepared.

the Imperial College paper estimates 2 million dead in the US with no response and ~1 million dead with a limited response that doesn’t involve a full shutdown. That paper explicitly doesn’t consider the very severe economic impacts but it’s hard to imagine that deaths on that scale aren’t worse than whatever they might be.

You can curve fit anything if you forget about the bias in your data.

These are tough questions, but I think they're worth answering so we know what we're really gaining by shutting down the economy. I know we want to save as many lives as possible, but we should also know the cost too.

So it isn't just virus deaths you have to factor in.

The paper points that all these estimates are based on extremely biased data.

Testing a random sample of the population to get a reliable estimate of the scale of the epidemic is dirt cheap compared to the drastic measures currently being taken.

It's incomprehensible to me that this wasn't one of first steps taken.

But you can lessen the impact on economy help with bring it back, western countries produce more than enough food to make sure nobody starves (if they want) If you leave covid 19 unchecked it will overwhelm your medical system anyway so even more people would loose access to medical care.

So the choice comes down to, hope that worst case (italy++) wont happen and carry on, or try to do something. And you cant get away with bulshit pretending that you are doing something when you are not, because people suddenly listen to scientist and doctors, when their ass is on the line.

Unsurprisingly we choose to do something.

Additionally given that in west most politicians are elected, and that most reliable voters and donors for political campaigns are from age group most affected by this virus, decision is even more obvious.

I suspect this will be analyzed for years to come.

My figure is $2 million.

Then a billion $ is 500 lives.

A trillion $ is 500,000 lives.

This is how I rate it. What is your figure on a life?

And how would you relate loss and gain of $ to buying / destroying lives?

The discussion changes when you leave the West, so start there.

Sounds ok. I think it's less, but it's the same for this calculation.

Do people even get trained in napkin math anymore?

Wiki is very limited on the topic- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-of-the-envelope_calculati...

The trouble is we can only get "real data" by testing more people. If we test more people we will almost certainly discover the numbers are worse than they appear now.

All that is to say that the situation can only be worse than we already know. I'm not sure more data would lead us to isolate less at all.

You might be right that there could be large numbers of people with the virus who are doing just fine right now, but we know from nearly 200,000 cases (that's plenty) that a non-trivial portion of cases require hospitalization. That's the whole problem, right there.

So we know hospitals can be overwhelmed and a LOT of people die for it. Healthcare workers included.

We know the situation is probably worse than it looks, but we won't know how much worse for weeks yet.

So without real data, it seems to err on the side of caution is absolutely essential. This can bring countries to their knees within weeks, and it has.

What would you propose we do without real data?

You're not applying the logic all the way through.

If a great number of people are already infected and do not require hospitalization it grossly affects the math on the potential for overwhelming our medical system.

Those infected people unnoticeable to minor symptoms have the potential to be the herd immunity we'd want from a vaccine.

> All that is to say that the situation can only be worse than we already know. I'm not sure more data would lead us to isolate less at all.

More infected people who are unnoticed because they don't show severe symptoms and require hospitalization actually makes the situation better. It would lower the hospitalization rate and alter the projections drastically in the direction of less epidemic.

We are being cautious right now. That, by definition, means we're likely overreacting.

We get "real data" by properly testing, not necessarily by testing more people.

Currently we are mainly testing people arriving with symptoms.

This results in underestimate of the number of infected and an overestimate of mortality and morbidity rates.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

There may be legitimate criticism of the broad policy approach, but “blindly following China” isn't one of them.

“It could happen here, but it’s not a big concern.”

“It’s happening here, and it’s a big concern, but we don’t have reliable data so let’s do nothing.”

“We have reliable data now, but it’s too late to do anything.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak

You can make anything fit an exponential curve if you try hard enough.

I'm french. I have italian friends. I don't care about the economy. It will be back up. As long as there are humans they will need goods.

> there will be no more projects even for IT people.

Sure. But let's put it in balance for France:

- less work for IT people

- 350K deaths

I vote for number one. I can't believe I'm reading that on this forum, where people are supposed to be educated. This is insane.

Look at life expectancy chart for Russia in the 90ies. This was mere economic mismanagement, and it's far worse than the worst case virus scenario. In some countries, unemployment and economic mismanagement leads to civil wars, revolutions and dictatorships.

Sure, techies in democratic/democratic-socialist first world countries will be probably fine in bad economy, if my experience in the great recession is any indication. A chance to buy cheaper stocks, too! However, even in a mild recession hundreds of millions (at least) will suffer. I'd choose 350k deaths.

EDIT: Come think of it, if you could completely mitigate one historical event in Europe, would you go for Spanish flu (millions of deaths!) or Great Depression (mere economy, of no consequence)?

Life is the most important thing.

Also, the spanish flu has killed between 50M - 100M according to the most recent estimations.