Re:Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19
by ajross on Monday April 13, 2020 @11:30PM
(#22862516)
> Which would in fact be good news in a certain way
This holds for the calculus of personal risk ("I'm sick, will I die?"), but not public risk nor policymaking.
Whatever the "true" severity of this disease is, it's known, experimentally, to be high enough to overwhelm regional hospital capacity. That means that it has to be controlled, because if it isn't then a lot of people will be sick without care, and thus a lot more people will die.
It's true that we don't know the "pessimal peak" of case load. Maybe we'd be looking at a doomsday scenario of only 4M people dead globally, and not the 40M the measured fatality rate would indicate. But... who cares? We won't get that high, because we had to lock down even for the "good news" 4M number.
This holds for the calculus of personal risk ("I'm sick, will I die?"), but not public risk nor policymaking.
Whatever the "true" severity of this disease is, it's known, experimentally, to be high enough to overwhelm regional hospital capacity. That means that it has to be controlled, because if it isn't then a lot of people will be sick without care, and thus a lot more people will die.
It's true that we don't know the "pessimal peak" of case load. Maybe we'd be looking at a doomsday scenario of only 4M people dead globally, and not the 40M the measured fatality rate would indicate. But... who cares? We won't get that high, because we had to lock down even for the "good news" 4M number.