Re:L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Elim...
by afiori on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:38AM
(#22876258)
I would say that doubling the death rate sounds bad. There is a point to be made that the main effect could be more on the side of reducing the high percentiles of lifespan rather than a long term increase in the death rate.
Also I think that setting an acceptable death rate is missing the point; depending on the illness anything between 0% to 100% is "acceptable" if there is nothing we can do. A more appropriate measure (IMHO) would be a something vaguely like lives_saved^2/effort.
In particular this need to consider the famous flattening the curve and the fact that for some categories of people the mortality rate can be very high.
On the other hand (and also on a more amoral side) it would be interesting how many alive man-months COVID-19 destroyed, as in how long was the average life expectancy of the people that died from it. I feel like this would be both harder to measure and more significant in term of sociological damage.
(in general this kind of conversations are hard as it is easy to insinuate that old people have less value which is both completely false and somewhat true, I personally do not possess the talent of walking this fine line of language)
Also I think that setting an acceptable death rate is missing the point; depending on the illness anything between 0% to 100% is "acceptable" if there is nothing we can do. A more appropriate measure (IMHO) would be a something vaguely like lives_saved^2/effort.
In particular this need to consider the famous flattening the curve and the fact that for some categories of people the mortality rate can be very high.
On the other hand (and also on a more amoral side) it would be interesting how many alive man-months COVID-19 destroyed, as in how long was the average life expectancy of the people that died from it. I feel like this would be both harder to measure and more significant in term of sociological damage.
(in general this kind of conversations are hard as it is easy to insinuate that old people have less value which is both completely false and somewhat true, I personally do not possess the talent of walking this fine line of language)