That's a harsh over-response to this particular comment, but I've read your follow-up comments below, and you seem to be dismissing the human cost far too easily.
You're bored and frustrated as someone experiencing a lockdown, and there is definitely a case to be made for balancing out economic harm with human deaths, but you're not making that case. You don't seem to be adequately weighing the difference between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people dead at all.
Far from stupid or irresponsible, a total lockdown would likely literally save millions of lives. The impact of several million lives on the economy is a big one.
To put it in perspective, closing down the nation due to big outbreaks in particular regions is like closing down Darwin Australia due to the initial outbreak in Wuhan.
Isn't China bigger than the States by land area?
China is larger though by all accounts.
https://www.worldometers.info/geography/largest-countries-in...
We don't shut down the road network despite the number of deaths that causes.
How many lives would a lockdown really save? And how many years of life will it save? If it kills people now that would die of Flu next winter that is different than if it kills someone in their 20s. Nobody really knows the answer. How many road deaths will be saved due to lockdown? How many extra deaths from heart failure due to people not exercising? How many fewer deaths from people not eating junk food?
How much is the economic cost of that lockdown? Again nobody really knows - without a lockdown people are still likely going to be more subdued in their economic activity from a social point of view.
One thing that is sure is that healthcare systems will collapse without a lockdown. How many lives do hospitals save each year?
What benefit does the Covid-19 epidemic confer that you can compare it to road travel?
Road deaths involve humans undertaking an action (driving) for a particular benefit (transport) that involves risk (accidents).
You cannot compare driving to the 'covid-19 epidemic', because driving is an action, and the covid 19 epidemic is not. You can't compare the epidemic to driving. You must compare action to action.
A more apt comparison is that humans go out of their home (the action) to work and be productive (the benefit) while understanding they may catch disease when with other humans (the risk).
You are not forced to leave your house against your will -- that is slavery, and is illegal. Anyone can stay home. Leaving your home has the benefit of both enriching you and your neighbor, and collectively, the country. Thus it is a very apt comparison.
The fact of the matter is we don't close roads because we judge them too important to merit doing so, and we decide to accept the risk (deaths). We have decided now against leaving homes because some states judge it too dangerous to do so and is unwilling to accept the risk (deaths), but that is not constant, and will likely change quite fast. I would not be surprised if many of those who called for a lockdown, start calling for it to end quite soon. Most people are only principled up until it starts actually affecting them.
roads are a bad analogy because you don't spread crashes if you crash yourself or get crashed into. car crashes do not follow an exponential curve and aren't contagious. you always know you've been in a crash (except if you die). somebody's always at fault if there's a crash. pretty much none of these are true in case of a plague. we close roads and quarantine people because diseases are contagious and kill people or leave them disabled more or less randomly.
Your argument is that, yes, road travel means we choose more deaths (thus implicitly validating the argument you're trying to critique), but that because the deaths don't spread exponentially, this is okay. That is a fine viewpoint, but it relies on the premise you're trying to disprove (that we are in fact okay choosing more death in order to facilitate unnecessary human interaction).
And frankly, Thatcher has nothing to do with this, so you should probably stop bringing her up.
Lets go with it. Now is going out of your home and being productive the only way to catch Covid-19? What about going for a walk, a meal, shopping, hanging out in the park, a theater, concert......I think you are setting up a strawman here.
All these things have been deemed non-essentials in large parts of the world, and the government is enforcing it. Clearly if preservation of life is goal #1, the government can certainly shut down most life to pursue that goal. In reality, the government -- and by extension the people -- make the decision to value life in quality of life terms -- in other words, money. Thus, while I don't think people who say we should open the economy up right now are correct, I don't fundamentally disagree with their premise that human life is valued monetarily by governments all the time when deciding what policies to enact. And that is okay.
Well, going out and working has rather large economic benefits.
Look, driving kills people, and we accept it because it brings huge benefits. Going to work as normal in the current environment would ALSO bring huge benefits, and kill people. We don't know how many, but we think it's a few million in the US. This is probably not worth it, but if it were a few thousand people instead it WOULD be worth it.
That's the comparison here.
We accept the deaths that travel and activity cause
Economies with good human capital recover after disaster, like the Japan and Germany did after WWII.
[1]: See Page 7 and 13 https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
[2]: Second paragraph of page 15
That's 30 million years of life without a lockdown. In the U.S. a year of life is under $150k, so that's an upper "value" of lockdown of $4.5T
U.S. GDP is 21T, so a 25% drop in GDP caused by a lockdown would not be value for money.
"How can you equate money with life saved"? Ask that when nobody is uninsured.
>> In the U.S. a year of life is under $150k
Um, no that's not even close. It's $10M[1] based on VSL. Try your math again.
If you are so inclined, how do you count the dip in births during the bad economy? That is 80+ years of life expectancy each, whereas the GP is over-estimating the life expectancy loss from COVID, I think the average age of the dead in Italy, after overwhelming healthcare, is over 80.
Then, on the higher end, economic collapse of the Soviet Union reduced life expectancies so much that that probably destroyed more life years than hypothetical COVID epidemic ever could, all by itself; before you count the above.
The year of life estimate of $10M is also preposterous. If I gave you a choice of living to 85 with average wage lifetime earnings, or 84 with the same +$10M, which would you take?
It’s worth noting that the United States invested in repairing the economies of both nations after WWII
What qualifications do you have to assume this virus might kill 100k and not 10 million? Are you ok with 10 million?
Assuming you have friends who have elderly parents, are you ok with visiting them to tell them they are likely to die but it's for a good cause - 'the economy'.
None. You are either ready for a massive shutdown or you are not. I actually was convinced of the shutdown until just a couple days ago. Things start to break. Your car insurance might expire. Your heater might go down but there is no one to repair it. Cabin fever (even though I'm an introvert and probably handling it better than most people out there). Some people are stuck in one place and need to move to another place.
As time goes by, I can see more and more people changing to the opinion that this was a bad idea. They are not ready and the shutdown risk completely devastating their life or worse.
> What qualifications do you have to assume this virus might kill 100k and not 10 million? Are you ok with 10 million?
We know it's deadly but not that deadly. The numbers from Korea, Italy and the Diamond princess are not good but they are not world-ending either. They are painful but that's it.
> Assuming you have friends who have elderly parents, are you ok with visiting them to tell them they are likely to die but it's for a good cause - 'the economy'.
I have elderly parents. The guideline is that they stay at home. They have a garden, a couple dogs and enough food. But at some point I expect that they'll probably be okay with the risk and seeing me rather than spending 2 year confined with no human contact.
I am unclear on what you mean by "not that deadly". So let's discuss exactly how deadly we are talking about.
However https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... is a research paper published 2 days ago. Their median estimate for the infection fatality rate is 0.66%. Which, applied to the US population, suggests on the order of 2 million deaths. (More if everyone gets it, probably a bit less since only most of us would be likely to get it.)
If half the world population gets it, make that about 20 million. Or about a third of the total deaths in WW 2.
These kinds of evidence based numbers are rather worse than I would describe as, "...painful but that's it." But maybe your standards are different than mine.
3 million a year die in the U.S. each year anyway. How many of those 3 million will die of covid this year rather than cancer, or heart failure? Does that really matter?
I got that figure from http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,0... which suggests that a year of life should be worth about $130,000. So that is a bit over $10k per month.
Furthermore your hypothetical is slanted to minimizing the problem. Sure, these people are often old and sick. The median age of those killed is around 80. But they were Generally not on death’s door. From https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html your average 80 year old has over 3 years to live. So we should be willing to spend at least $400k. Per life at the median. We are starting to talk about real money now.
But even so it is still low. Because the arithmetic average of this grizzly calculation is pulled up a lot by the younger people who die.
OK, I see you retort, so you’re coming to an order of a magnitude of a trillion dollars for the USA. But aren’t we doing more trillions in stimulus? Does that make sense?
The answer is yes. When we “spend” trillions in stimulus, we get most of it back. (In 2008 we actually made a profit.)
So even if you want to argue straight dollars and cents like an actuary does, we still come out ahead. Preserving human lives, even old people who do not have long to live, is valuable.
Lets say 2 million would die without a lockdown.
That's 30 million years of life without a lockdown.
In the U.S. a year of life is under $150k, so that's an upper "value" of lockdown of $4.5T
U.S. GDP is 21T, so a 25% drop in GDP caused by a lockdown would not be value for money.
Just think about it. Will life simply return to normal with everybody going to beaches, stores, parks etc if they know the risks giving the new awareness of the disease? What I'm saying is that there is a high chance of a recession from the fear alone (not saying "irrational fear", simply "fear") as people will stay home and take fewer risks as they normally would, with the associated economic damage. Many will simply refuse to go back to an office.
So when calculating the savings from ending the lockdown, you have to take in consideration our losses from people's voluntary self-quarantine until the pandemic is effectively over if ending the lockdown prematurely.
There's also the subjective view - we aren't robots, people aren't objective automatons, many of us play the lottery for example, despite on average ending up behind, because we value the idea that we could get rich more than the value of the money we'd save not playing it.
There's then the relative weighting -- who suffers from that 25% fall in GDP? We may be willing to accept a 0.1% chance that someone in our close family will die in a car this year for $50k of personal gain, but we won't accept a 50% chance for "the economy" gaining $100m, of which $99m will go to "the 1%".
A crashing GDP affects "the 1%" more in financial terms than the majority. On the other hand with no cash to pay
There's then the value of a life. To me, my life and my family's life is far more important than yours. That's human nature. In the trolley problem where the choice is between killing their child and diverting it to kill 2 anonymous KKK members, almost everyone will divert it. Will a typical 25 year old with no family, a minimum wage job, and no health insurance, be willing to lose their home and live on the streets for the next 10 years in the unlikely save an 80 year old billionaire who doesn't care about them?
Thinking of it as objectively as I can, I can't see a scenario where the country keeps functioning well with the massive, rapid number of deaths associated with Covid-19. I know people die by the thousands in car accidents and other things. But at least in the short term, the widespread panic from a novel disease in ~2x/day geometric growth with 0.5-1.0% death rate (at best) would far exceed in severity anything we've ever seen.
Imagine Italy with no lockdown, would that be conducive to a healthy, or just mildly impacted economy? I don't see it. We had time to act, we didn't, now every option is bad, and now we're feeling the pain of the "less bad" option.
Currently Goldman Sachs is estimating that next quarter will see production drop by 24%. If production drops for a single quarter by that much then rebounds, this is still worthwhile on that estimate. If it drops for a whole year by that much, you are right that the implicit value we are giving these lives is more than we are willing to pay to save lives in other circumstances.
There are broadly three options the US has
1) Total lockdown
2) Sporadic geographic lockdowns of various intenstiy
3) Do nothing
Factors we don't know include how behavior would change even without top down pressures (i.e. doing nothing will still damage economic output), and how long lockdowns can last before protests, riots, and full on civil war, how effective a lockdown would be, what pressure there will be on healthcare providers in each scenario (including say healthcare workers refusing to treat patients)
While our higher brains knows that as a society we are unwilling to spend $1 billion to extend someone's life by 2 days, when it comes to this sort of magnitude there are other considerations than financial benefits, indeed the entire situation brings questions of what is the value of money anyway. When we say we're willing to spend $150k to extend a life by a year, what does that actually mean?
Long story short, it is worth it.
If we do three months of lockdown and then people give up and head out as normal again, we've burned a few trillion dollars, and a hundred million years of US citizen lives, for nothing. The deaths still come, just shifted back three months. That's the worst case, and it's what we might be heading for.
Universal mask wearing would go a long way, especially with a much lower baseline of active infections.
Do it online, or over the phone. (I just did!) New York is waiving things like annual car inspections and registration renewals, as well.
> Your heater might go down but there is no one to repair it.
Most of the shutdown implementations permit emergency repairs and grocery/medicine shopping.
I live in a third-world. That's not an option. Insurance is waived for 2 weeks. But they just extended the confinement for 2 weeks more. How much are they going to keep waiving?
> Most of the shutdown implementations permit emergency repairs and grocery/medicine shopping.
These get disrupted because of the regulations/bureaucracies. Repairers now have to get a permit to go outside and drive. A simple grocery trip now takes 1.5-2 hours and lots of items are no longer available. This will get worse as the chain is pretty much disrupted at multiple levels.
This seems like a silly question. If they're already waiving, it's likely they'll continue to do so as long as the travel restrictions are in place. The first waiver seems like a pretty clear "we're not idiots" signal.
Not that you need car insurance if you're stuck at home...
> This will get worse as the chain is pretty much disrupted at multiple levels.
It's likely it'll get better as the initial supply shock eases and supply chains recover. It's not like we're all suddenly eating twice as much food - we just bought more than usual all at once.
This part has been interesting - I live alone, and have worked from home for a while, but it's still starting to get to me. I can't imagine people that live by themselves and are used to going to the office every day / are more extroverted.
This is fine.
I'm the introverted one, so under normal circumstances I take any chance I get to stay at home. But I do get a certain kind of energy just from being around people in public, which is why I like grocery shopping.
You lumped Korea and Italy together which is strange. Then apparently (seeing your comment chain) you tried to transpose it onto US and rest of the world.
Korea was ready (experience with previous outbreaks). They started early. They tested like there's no tomorrow and are still doing that. Test - isolate, test - isolate, test - isolate. Everybody wearing masks - negative, positive, or untested. Everybody [1]
And their health infra is impeccable. They are people with a great civic sense (I have lived there for months).
But because this is an opportunity for power grab by the government they'll much better prefer to have everyone confined rather than implement sanitary procedure and do massive testing.
> Like having everyone in a hazmat suit and do massive testing.
That'd require a shutdown in order to produce enough PPE and tests. Just like we're currently experiencing.
This is what worries me. This disease isn't as bad as it could be, but will reset expectations. Go in too hard and next time, with a similar disease but with a higher utilisation and it's a mess.
So if the average lifespan is 75 years, a 6 month shutdown could be viewed as costing 2million lifespans of being outside.
Now this is rough, because being dead versus quarantined isn't the same. On the other hand, the people dying are predominantly at end-of-life, so the figure might really want to multiply by 10 to get a better estimate (because most of the dying people will have had < 10 years left anyways).
And that's entirely aside from the economic consequences.
China locked down and won a battle, but you will likely see another outbreak in a few weeks, and if they lockdown again, there will be another outbreak when they open up again. The daily cases chart will look like a dribbling ball.
Notice that US officials are focusing flattening the curve, instead of a strict quarantine to prevent all infections. It's not only because they're worried about the economy or the logistics. It's because a strict quarantine only works if everyone is doing it - I mean EVERYONE in the world. If we do a Nationwide lockdown, we will need to do another one when an asymptomatic visitor/citizen enters/returns to the US.
I see two outcomes: 1) Eventually, most everyone will either be infected or immunized for this pandemic to stop. 2) We do a global lockdown for 5 weeks.
It is unlikely but possible that suicides from the shutdown will exceed deaths from the disease. But it is absolutely not true that they will exceed projected deaths from letting the disease run its course unchecked.
Here is a parallel. We are afraid of buildings catching fire, so we build sprinkler systems into them. But the result is that in actual fires, the water damage from the sprinkler system exceeds the damage from the fire. That's because there is a fairly small fire and a big wet area from the sprinklers.
Is this an argument for not having the sprinkler system? Of course not! Because the damage from the sprinkler system is far less than what the damage from an unchecked fire would have been.
By my estimate, the deaths in the USA alone, with no lockdowns, is around 2 million this year. Other attempts that I’ve seen to estimate it come out with similar figures.
A too-large rush of cases will overload our system and result in medical providers succumbing to the virus as well, resulting in it shutting down.
That would result in millions more suffering and possibly dying.
That might make you think a ventilator surge might save 10-20% of people who otherwise would have died. But that's not true because we can choose who gets the ventilators. The actual difference in death rate will be small because we will stop ventilating the cases that still have a 95%+ chance of dying even with ventilating. Ultimately, the impact of the ventilator surge is going to be a bunch of 80+ year old patients with significant comorbidities getting pointless interventions. It's going to save few lives and will only marginally impact the mortality rate.
Every day of delay increases the chances of treatments being more available and better understood.
The countries that responded with inaction must now pay the price, or will pay the price.
I don't think it would be a 3-4 month shutdown anyway. I expect a gradual loosening of rules starting in a month or earlier, as new cases drop, and as we understand more about the virus, as well ad the efficacy of various lockdown measures.
[1]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/77482/5/Impe...
You do realize this guy, the first guy listed in the paper, originally said the UK would loose 400,000 and the US 2 million no matter what. Now he's saying 20k for the US, but he's still trying to tell us his original estimate wasn't wrong, it was just assuming people did nothing, which is not what his original estimate said at all!
None of his estimates have matched the numbers so far, not even in Italy. Ferguson and his other researchers are spreading bad and dangerous information.
That 'original estimate' is from the paper that 'alexandercrohde linked, and that's pretty much exactly what his original estimate said.
> In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months(Figure 1A). In such scenarios, given an estimated R0 of 2.4, we predict 81% ofthe GB and US populations would be infected over the course of the epidemic. Epidemic timings are approximate given the limitations of surveillance data in both countries: The epidemic is predicted to be broader in the US than in GB and to peak slightly later. This is due to the larger geographic scale of the US, resulting in more distinct localised epidemics across states (Figure 1B)than seen across GB. The higher peak in mortality in GB is due to the smaller size of the country and its older population compared with the US. In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality.
"In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour" means "assuming people do nothing."
Can you please provide a link to more info about the 20k number?
EDIT: thanks to 'alexandercrohde, the 20k number is in fact for the UK, not the US, meaning that it is from this same paper too (see rest of thread)
'djsumdog, it's pretty clear who is spreading misinformation here, and it isn't Ferguson. I don't know where you get your information, but Ferguson has not shown any inconsistency. The report gave numbers for the unmitigated scenario and the scenario with mitigations. I don't see how he could be accused of walking back his original prediction when they were all presented at once in a single table.
Whatever numbers can be believed, the US is already over 4000 deaths at 900+/day.
The other poster is probably basing their numbers off this tally, which is more up to date and shows 912 deaths yesterday:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
Researchers go and model data, making every caveat imaginable along the way, and then predict outcomes based on possible actions taken, and your response is to label them as spreading "bad" and "dangerous" information. You're literally condemning them for doing the science at all. You're inadvertently screaming at models...
Author's character aside, the math still seems right to me.
But I'm receptive to any published journal articles that explain how 350m people with a 1%~ fatality rate leads to less than 1m deaths.
A 3-4 months shutdown is going to bankrupt pretty much everyone. Those who were running thin but also those who were saving a bit. Unless you have a 1 year expenses upfront and probably own your house in your name, you are going bankrupt and will be relying on the government for help.
Next we are going to see massive disruption for pretty much everything and every consumer good. This is a good opportunity for government intervention and for government (or Big Co) to own pretty much everything.
The virus might kill 100k in the US (or millions) let's just assume that cost and prepare for a future outbreak.