That's quite the overreaction.
Italy found that among fatalities the median age is over 80 (older than the average lifespan of an Italian man).
99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...
To put it another way: most of the folks dying from COVID-19 were already dying. This disease is the straw that broke the camel's back.
Should we just give up on them? No! But instead of quarantining everyone, and sending us back to the stone age, we should work to quarantine these folks while the rest of us return to normalcy and build up our antibodies and herd immunity.
It's not just fatalities, hospitalisation i.e. exhausting healthcare facilities is the primary concern with COVID-19.
There is no guarantee that young people wouldn't make up high mortality list in a poor country with high younger population, rich countries should get their acts together to stop that from happening in vulnerable countries.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
There are 40 million 40-somethings in the USA, you're proposing that 100% of them will have lung damage.
Let's imagine that 80% of the population is infected, that 80% of cases are symptomatic, and that 80% of the 4.90% of hospitalised cases (this 4.90 is direct from the report) get damaged lungs. This is one million 40-somethings, not the entire population.
1 million sounds like a lot, but its only 2.5% of the population at that age range, and assume worst-case.
You know what causes reduced lung functionality in adults? Asthma, driven by air pollution from vehicles and coal power plants. 7.7% of adults have Asthma. Where is the war-scale drive to eliminate fossil-fueled vehicles and power generation?
Vaping. I see most of the young adults doing this. Its probably why they're having the higher hospitalization rates with coronavirus. They already have lung damage.
Might as well just shut the economy down to eliminate that.
(my bad, it's not easy to go through the slides on a phone)
Edit: by "skew" I imply mix the two categories COVID Vs "all other causes" and will give false average if we are trying to focus only on the COVID cases.
The narrative that this disease only affects the economically unproductive is dangerous at best, and inhumane at worst.
My feeling is that I'd rather be chronically sick in a good economy than in a depression. What happens when medicine becomes unavailable due to supply chains being cut off?
I'd rather a strong, comprehensive public health response than trying to economic recovery ourselves out of this problem. IMHO, the economy is a distraction to numb us from the tsunami of ICU patients and deaths to come.
The economy is not sacred, and is cyclical, and needs a good purge and rebalancing every 8 years or so. Recessions reallocate capital to be used more efficiently. After 2008 they were politicized as something to be avoided at all costs.
What isn't sacred are the people who own all that. They are as disposable as are any other parts of the economic machine. Replacing them is probably a good idea.
I expect the economic impacts to be rough either way. We don’t have a choice for “no economic impact” anymore. Either we do it in a coordinated and somewhat controlled manner now while we still have a handle on cases vs illness, or the impacts hit, roll, and peak along with the cases of illness while well/well-ish people try to improvise individual responses which probably have similar econ impacts but may not be as effective.
Or did we think that thousands on thousands falling ill at once wasn’t going to hurt economically?
To me it seems likely the difference between a recession (guaranteed) and a real, extremely serious depression which will be fully capable of exacting its own toll on lives.
Second, I expect that the illness impacts will hit even broader, both in sheer numbers and crossing demographic expectations, resulting in people directly absent from work and consumption for weeks at a time.
Those are the first order effects. The second order effects on psychology among a large number of folks having loved ones dying and acquaintances suffering are going to produce some behavior changes. Some of them would be similar to those we're seeing with lockdown, but as I said, improvised rather than coordinated, probably combining some degree of the same impacts but with less of the benefits.
The recession might be milder if we trade a higher death toll. Might.
But the financial markets sure didn't think we were going to escape one even before US civil measures started ratcheting up.
[0] https://medium.com/@juliael84791135/this-isnt-a-normal-flu-i...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/505995/adults-with-hyper...
The state with the lowest incidence of hypertension still has roughly 1 in 4 adults with hypertension. West Virginia is at the top with more than 1 in 2 adults. What do you think happens to them when they develop COVID-19? Hypertension is at the top of the list of co-morbidities that worsen outcomes. Medication to treat hypertension is often extremely inexpensive even without insurance ($10-$20/mo at the low end) and thus hypertension is often easy and inexpensive to manage.
How many folks working at pharma companies do you think have hypertension? What happens to the supply chain when people are incapacitated?
Even if a minority of the population will need hospitalization (hell, even if the minority is small enough to avoid overwhelming hospitals)... how many do you think will work through a SARS-CoV-2 infection?
The gravity with which I treat this pandemic is in large part based on government action. China quarantined nearly 100 million people. Iran is building mass graves. The uber-pro-business trump crony that serves as the secretary of the treasure took one look at the GOP plan and essentially said "double it, and make it cash with no means testing."
The folks arguing for immediately disruptive action aren't ignoring the economic consequences, they've decided that the economic consequences of doing nothing will be worse.
Obviously, the illness itself was always going to cause an economic blow by killing and sickening people.
And then there would be damage from behavioral changes. People were pulling kids out of schools, canceling events, and avoiding travel without being ordered to do so.
It doesn't seem like the "good economy" you suggest was ever an option.
It’s a solution ( it wouldn’t work the way you think, but it’s an option), but at least admit it clearly and live with it.
How long can you just shut down industries, keep kids out of school and will it make a significant dent in the total mortality? It could be that a couple of weeks of social distancing will be enough but can it be months and what are the comparable effects.
I know it is more dangerous than the normal flu and I will not downplay that but take Italy (that yes, would be worse of without shutdowns) you have 4k deaths so far; mostly old people while a couple of seasons ago they had 24k deaths attributed to a bad flu season.
The social distancing and shutting down society needs to work reasonably fast otherwise I wonder if it is worth it, at least in countries where you already have widespread disease.
Do you just assume we'll treat chronic health issues as a priority in a depression? I'd like to think we do as well, but the point is that things may well just stop working.
Also...
You make the error of assuming that (A) high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease mean that a person is "already dying," and (B) people who survive don't become debilitatingly sick.
The virus is just a convenient excuse; a crisis would have hit at the first sign of trouble.
Sure, the market was seeming to be overheated and due for a correction.
Without the virus, maybe it's 2008.
With the virus, it's starting to feel like 1929 again.
Huge numbers of people are unemployed right now that wouldn't be in a normal recession.
Wait till the unemployment numbers come out.
This thing has evolved three strains with only a couple hundred thousand cases. A couple billion turns it into a shit show.
Selection bias. They're so overwhelmed they're using age as a primary factor to triage patients. Clearly, if you put your medical resources towards saving the younger patients, the younger people are going to have a better survival rate. Lack of a ventilator, when you have a severe lung disease, is a massive risk factor at any age.
> 99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses.
Again, if you look at the oldest people, you're probably going to find more diseases there. This could easily be just another consequence of age-based triage.
Here is why you'll get tarred and feathered, because right now the media is covering the health costs of the virus extensively, but it's not covering the economic costs, which are already unfolding now in the form of businesses dropping vendors and announcing layoffs because their anticipated revenue until further notice is zero.
I've seen so many bros on my feeds who puffed out their chests a month or two ago and said, this virus is not a big deal. Then there were cases in their state and the media was reporting the deluge of new cases in the US and they said oh I was wrong, we need to be on total lockdown, and they're hiding in their apartments.
What will happen next is the jobless claims will come in, which we can clearly predict based on current business activity, and they will break records. I saw one estimate of around 1.5 million jobless claims this week, which is a record. I guess the bros will start squawking about the economic damage in 2-3 weeks once the media has covered this widely and people they know are out of work.
Small businesses (and some large ones too) typically don't have large cash reserves like Google. They also don't know whether this will last for one month or six. So they are in the process today of shutting down and telling everyone to go home without pay, they have to do this until they know what the long-term outlook is.
Nothing changes, most people are sheep, they parrot whatever's in their feed, they are poor at prognostication and self-examination, their attention is occupied by whatever narrative is being shouted most loudly. Nothing you can do.
> 99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses.
This is true, but what about the overcrowded hospitals this causes? People who weren't gonna die will now die. And what do we do about the doctors and nurses who are pleading with everyone to act?
Perhaps something along the lines of strict contact tracing could have been done, but now it seems like it's out of hand.
So far... wait until you get the number of critical cases above the number of ICU beds and you'll see 18 year olds dying from this
”As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.”
They reached maxed capacity of beds or ventilators right? We read stories of doctors having to make life & death decisions. Where are the dead 18 year olds?
Spreading info like that on a hunch, or an exaggeration, is counterproductive if not damaging.
The idea that relatively young (most of folks here) will be just fine is not true. With overwhelmed healthcare, most criticals will simply die. Once doctors will get sick (and they will), it will make everything, I mean literally any disease and injury much more dangerous. Sure, most will survive, hopefully without any permanent lungs/kidneys/testes damage (was this confirmed or just a rumor?).
Maybe as humanity we've grown weak and can't tolerate medieval mortality rates anymore, but this is who we are right now. There is no easy solution to this. There is unavoidable harsh economic impact coming. Nobody has clue which option will be at the end better than others.
Accept it, and try to find ways to help fellow human beings instead. We are in this all together, rich and poor, left and right alike.
I don't think any one is under some kind of delusion that some young people will die. The only question is what percentage and what changing those numbers will cost. Picking specific examples of bad outcomes and pretending the risk is as high as older people isn't doing anyone any favors.
I don't know about the law in Switzerland but unless you are lying that is something she could be fired for in many countries.
They just started to reach max capacity, and not in every region, every hospital at the same time...
”Pandemics begin with an investigation phase, followed by recognition, initiation, and acceleration phases. The peak of illnesses occurs at the end of the acceleration phase, which is followed by a deceleration phase, during which there is a decrease in illnesses. Different countries can be in different phases of the pandemic at any point in time and different parts of the same country can also be in different phases of a pandemic.”
So, we know not all the hospitals are experiencing the same levels at the same time. A big reason I wish we were more precisely targeting shutdowns and quarantines.
It doesn’t make sense to throw these blanket executive orders over entire states. As we can see from the slides, the economic consequence are dire. Why not target the cities entering acceleration only?
In the meantime, start building drive thru testing. Distribute thermometers. Practice social distancing & aggressive sanitation, but not destroy out national security in the process.
But this part,
”All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions”
Sure it’s early, but even in Italy, in one of the worst places in the world for the virus right now, that information should be very illuminating to us I think.
Because the long incubation period and the lack of sufficient testing makes it impossible to know which cities are infected early on.
And, to put more bluntly, because we have two models to look at and choose from: the Chinese one, with harsh containment measures that were very effective (if you believe their numbers) and the Italian one, with moderate containment measures and a lack of sense of urgency from the populace, which resulted in a downward spiral with more deaths than China despite having only ~58% the number of cases.
> I should have said, ”In some areas”.
And no, you shouldn't have said that, you should just wait another week.
Quantifying undetected COVID-19 cases and effects of containment measures in Italy
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339915690_Quantifyi...
"With demand outpacing supply of beds and respirators, medical workers are told to prioritize younger patients."
"The principle of "first come, first served" has been abandoned, said Mario Riccio, an anesthesiologist who works at a hospital in Cremona."
- https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-italy-doctors-to...
It all comes to what part of the curve the country is now, the choice being total lockdown incl. economic shutdown vs aggressive testing.
Considering US lapsed on aggressive measures in the beginning and that proper test kits are just being flown in from Italy[2]; total economic shutdown seems to be the only option left.
P.S. There are still high-risk countries which hasn't gone into lockdown neither doing aggressive testing as of now, claiming the number of cases are low although the day-to-day delta is increasing exponentially.
[1]Italy correspondent of Aljazeera gave this information multiple times on live, couldn't find static link to it as of writing.
[2]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/air-force-flew-500000-coro...