This may be true for now when most peoples' lives are as yet still unaffected by it, but it's very much not going to be true after a month of uncontrolled pandemic when everyone will know many people who've died from it.

I agree, though it'll be a little late at that point.

You're overestimating the impact. The worst case scenario is more like 1 out of every 100-200 Americans dying. Concentrated mostly in the elderly. The majority won't have anyone close to them die and few will have "many".

No, the worst case scenario is much worse than that. Hospitals won't have room to take care of most people with the virus or other illnesses for that matter, and many will die as a result of just that. The hospitalization rate is quite a bit more than 1%, and that becomes the death rate when no hospital can take care of you. These have all been repeated in the media many, many times by now. I'm in fascination of how people are receiving the memo so slowly in 2020.

Not to mention 1/100 is enough for a lot of people to result in at least one person they know dying.

>No, the worst case scenario is much worse than that

It's really not. People just don't seem to grasp that the rates for positive cases are drastically different than the rates for people infected. We aren't doing nearly enough testing to catch even all the symptomatic cases let alone the asymptomatic and mild ones.

The infection fatality rate is almost certainly under 1% and not everyone will get infected even in the worst case.

>Not to mention 1/100 is enough for a lot of people to result in at least one person they know dying.

Only if we use a very broad definition of what "know" means.

Look at parts of Italy--there are areas that have already had 1% of the population die. Note that most of these are not being reported as Covid-19 deaths (presumably because of the overload, they never got tested), we simply see it in excess mortality.

>Look at parts of Italy--there are areas that have already had 1% of the population die

Which parts are that?

Nembro, Italy. Pop. 11000, 152 deaths. 1.38% of the population died. In March.

Isn't that the part of Italy where hospital collapse actually happened? And in the same article they conjecture they are now at ~herd immunity. And the demographics are skewed towards the elderly so again they themselves estimated the death rate being consistent with 1%, age-adjusted. And they counted ALL the surplus dead. This is an upper bound of the absolute worst case, as far as I can tell.

Nobody there is going to die in April from covid?

They are past the peak (again based on the info from the original article), so it doesn't seem likely the numbers will change a lot; not to the level of 6%/3%/other numbers being suggested in other sources.

A small town doesn't really count as a "part" of a country.

It's also probably just a statistical outlier. Even if the overall IFR is 0.5% you will see some areas with rates higher or lower than that from chance or their demographics.

It's still early on in the pandemic. The vast majority of the people who will die from it still haven't yet. It's way too early to be putting ceilings on the overall death rate.

I believe there are more examples, but that is one of them.

You appear to be taking about the mortality rate when medical care is available. What is the rate after the hospitals are full?

First, the uncontrolled number is more like 4% because the healthcare system crashes. 1% is what you get when the healthcare system still works.

And most people have family members that are in the high risk group.

It's amazing how many people are willing to sacrifice millions of people on the altar of the economy--when it wouldn't even work very well because people are going to be minimizing risk anyway.

A useful question I've found is "So which of your friends and family are you prepared to sacrifice so we can all get back to normal?" Statistically speaking, with a rapid uncontrolled pandemic, everyone is gonna know at least several people who end up dying.

That’s unfair unless you also answer which of your friends you’re willing to sacrifice to unemployment, poverty, homelessness, depression, etc. so we can go on lockdown for longer.

I hate this framing that makes it seem like it’s a choice between caring about people and caring about money. When the economy crashes it causes real misery for real people.

None of my friends are family are being sacrificed to any of those things. Most are able to work from home or are classified as essential workers and are still working for that reason (e.g. I know some nurses and police officers), and the ones who were in the service sector are furloughed and are getting unemployment. None of this holds a candle to them dying.

What do you think is the overall right length of time for the lockdown? Do you think we should already be getting back to work now?

So basically you think there won’t be too much contagion and people who have jobs or are getting unemployment benefits now will still be in that state after a few months? And that the unemployment system can handle an almost overnight order of magnitude increase in demand? And that essential services like farms, shipping and grocery stores will survive long term despite the major supply chain disruption? That seems crazy optimistic to me but I guess I can’t convince you.

Please read up on the Great Depression. Economic downturns can be pretty bad. If they could have solved it by just giving everyone unemployment, they would have.

Edit:

> What do you think is the overall right length of time for the lockdown?

I don’t know dude, I’m not an economist. I just think the economic effects should be properly taken into account and weighed against the health effects. Yes, there is some amount of economic damage that it’s worth some number of people dying to avoid. That seems obvious to me, but people act like you’re a Nazi if you point it out.

The economic consequences of the shutdown will not be remotely as harmful as the deaths from not shutting down.

How do you know?