> Using hyperbolic emotional appeals to drown out discussion is not the right move.

But isn't that what you just did here?

> Do you understand that millions of people are now out of work and won't be able to support their families, businesses are collapsing, calls to suicide lines are up massively, and society is general is not functioning?

So let's do some math instead.

The last stats I had were that 5% of people who catch it will die without a ventilator, 0.5% will die with it. So suppose we go "fast burn" to try to get "herd immunity" as quickly as possible, forget about overwhelming the health care system. 80% of your friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers will catch it, and 5% of those will die.

I reckon most people have about 500-1000 people they feel connected to. So think about your network: which 20-40 people do you want to die so that the rest can go back to work?

> But isn't that what you just did here?

No, because I'm not drowning out the discussion, simply pushing back on the usage of hyperbole for pushing an opinion.

> The last stats I had were that 5% of people who catch it will die without a ventilator,

Your stats are way off and I suggest doing better research. They also don't factor in the idea that the virus is far more widespread than initially thought, and that these death rates only account for people that are sick enough to get tested in the first place.

> Your stats are way off and I suggest doing better research.

I've been reading [1] daily more or less since early February, as well as lots of things posted here. I'm certainly no professional, but I think I'm reasonably well-informed for a layperson. If you think there's something I've missed, I think you'd do much better to actually point me to a resource you think is better.

I realize that "number reported" is an issue, and varies a lot from country to country. But consider Germany, who have [EDIT: ramped up to 400k+ tests per week] now. The most recent numbers from the situation report says that Germany has 125k reported cases, with 3k reported deaths -- a death rate of 2.3%. EDIT: Also consider Korea, which is alleged to have instituted a massive testing infrastructure as well. Their numbers are currently 10,564 cases, 222 deaths -- again, 2.1% death rate.

It's possible that both the German and Korean numbers of cases are massively underreported, but it can't be by much. That puts the death rate with non-overwhelmed hospitals at significantly higher than 0.5%.

If you want to convince me that the death rate for overwhelmed hospitals is less than 5%, you're going to have to do better than waving your your hands and saying "but what about people not sick enough get tested".

EDIT2: Been challenged on the "500k tests per day", acknowledging that while I look for support for that claim.

EDIT3: I slightly mangled my numbers from [2]. The numbers from that are that Germany has been doing 160K tests per week since 20 March; and that the government's goal is 200k per day. [2] According to [3], on the week ending April 5, Germany did 393k tests.

[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

[2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-germany-has-managed-...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing#germany

Your mental model is mostly meaningless. There's no such thing as a generic death rate for a disease, because the death rate is dependent on numerous factors. You cannot compare the death rate between countries with different demographic profiles and ask "which is correct". How old are they? How fat are they? The idea that 5% of a person's social network is going to die is not accurate because social networks aren't evenly distributed. Most people don't have many contacts over 80 unless they're over 80 themselves. Most people will see very few deaths to people they're connected to. Old people will see a lot. And it's sad, but most of the people dying are already above life expectancy and close to death from alternative causes.

Hospitals being overwhelmed is an exaggerated problem. It's not happening in many places. Most hospitals only need to provide a small amount of care and can actually scale this up rather quickly. You hear about people being triaged in Italy, but you need to remember that the people being triaged are likely to die regardless of whether or not they're admitted to the hospital. Averages are not your friend here. If 50% of ICU patients survive, that does not mean that everyone going into the ICU has a 50% chance of surviving. If we get to a point that triaging is needed (I think dubious in major US cities), that does not mean fatality rates will skyrocket.

Social distancing has been pretty darn effective, and it's probably a good idea to cautiously continue. But we also need to be pragmatic.

> Hospitals being overwhelmed is an exaggerated problem. It's not happening in many places.

...because people are introducing restrictions to keep the number of cases down.

> Your mental model is mostly meaningless. ...Social distancing has been pretty darn effective, and it's probably a good idea to cautiously continue. But we also need to be pragmatic.

Ok, but at least mine I told you what the exact numbers are and where they came from. What are your numbers, and where did they come from?

You can't not have a model: you can either have an explicit one that you can reason about and question, or you'll have an implicit one you can't reason about or question.

You've waved your hand about why 5% death rate for a "fast burn" scenario is probably not exactly the precise number. I never said it was; but I think there's a pretty good chance it's in that ballpark.

You, on the other hand, haven't said what you think the death rate for a "fast burn" will be.

It is IRRESPONSIBLE to recommend a course of action without thinking through the consequences. Just wishing that 5% of people won't die isn't going to prevent those people from dying.

I'd like a 0.001% fatality rate in a "fast burn" scenario as much as anybody. If you can convince me that's a good number, I'll go around and try to convince others. Until that time, I'm going to continue going with the best guess I have, and a guess which lots of experts seem to be making as well.

> ...because people are introducing restrictions to keep the number of cases down

I mean, yes, I do agree that social distancing is a good idea and that we should continue to do so. I acknowledged that much. But my real point here is that hospital capacity can scale up significantly higher than you might assume. Average level of care goes down for each person, but that's mostly fine. We can't treat people for this disease, so all the hospitals are doing is trying to keep people alive long enough to get over it themselves. A half hearted benefit of this is that since there isn't much you can do, you don't have to do much to help people as best as possible.

> Ok, but at least mine I told you what the exact numbers are and where they came from. What are your numbers, and where did they come from?

When I say your mental model is meaningless, I'm referring to "which 20-40 people do you want to die so that the rest can go back to work". You're thinking in averages, and that's not the case. The CFR of any population is going to be determined, foremost by the age distribution. I don't know if this is still true, but a while ago the CFR in italy was lower in every age group relative to China but worse overall due to age group differences and simpsons paradox. The concept of death rate is truly meaningless. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying its a pointless discussion. But sure, range of 0.5%-7% for a randomly chosen locale. Less than 1% average for those under 60 years old across the board.

For the record, I don't think rushing to herd immunity makes sense either, but there is a middleground.

> It is IRRESPONSIBLE to recommend a course of action without thinking through the consequences. Just wishing that 5% of people won't die isn't going to prevent those people from dying.

I think its pretty naive to say it's irresponsible to not have explicit threats on the disease but hand wave explicit threats on the economic consequences. I think it's better to let a 90 year old person die than to throw a 20 year old into poverty personally. Globalism is complicated. Depressions can cause famines, the rise of violent authoritarianism, and just general despair even if your particular society holds together. Poverty sucks, and it disproportionately hurts people who are already poor or in poor countries.

Do you have a link for this 500,000 tests per day? Every article I am reading says they only started ramping up testing in the past few weeks.

> And the total number of swab tests done by 4 April was well over 1.3 million.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52234061

The population of Germany is 83 million. I find it hard to believe that they've tested more than 5 million or so people in 10 days.

So I did mangle my numbers somewhat, thanks for checking. As of April 5th they'd done 1.3 million tests, found 95k cases, and had 1.4k deaths [1]. Presumably there are at least some people tested multiple times; so those 1.3 million tests don't represent 1.3 million people.

The only way to get the "die with the best medical care" number below 0.1% is if you have a million untested people who are sick.

If I was a proper statistician, with those numbers I could probably come up with models or estimates of how many possibly untested people there might be in Germany. My instinct is that number can't be millions, because at least some of those millions would be sick enough to go to the hospital, and then all of their connections would be tested and be found out.

But even then, what we really need is the "would have died without medical care" number, which is what the number would look like if we did a "fast burn" and let everyone get sick at once. For that number to be less than 1% (which would still be pretty dire), we need closer to 2 million unknown cases. I just don't see how 2 million positive cases can hide from the kind of testing Germany is doing. The same goes for Korea.

[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

All models are wrong, but 1) some models are useful, and 2) you can't not have a model. If you don't have an explicit model, you have an implicit model.

I presented you a model; yes it's oversimplified, but it results in at least some sort of concrete answer; and you can actually examine where it came from and reason about how valid it is. You can make arguments for some other death rate or herd immunity rate. (I took 80% from the most recent article I heard on the subject, but previously I heard 60%.)

You also actually have a model in your head for how many people are going to die (or not die). But I don't know where it came from. I can't examine it or reason about it. If you were an old-timer who'd seen hundreds of pandemics, or a historical epidemiologist who had studied hundreds of epidemics, maybe your "gut feel" would carry some weight.

But since (AFAICT) you're a layperson like me, I'm not inclined to think your implicit model is going to be very accurate.

Hmm, this one seems unpopular for some reason. I thought it was useful and polite. Anyone want to give me a hint?

In the end no one will know if it was worth it since no country went in the other direction and just lived with it. The UK tried for a bit but then reacted harshly as the situation worsened.

Maybe not doing anything would've resulted in a few months of medical chaos and not much more, maybe it would've destroyed whole societies. But the polls I'm aware of show that the majority of people is supportive of measures nearly everywhere (I'm not aware of a poll that shows the opposite). In democracies, you'd expect politicians to act if the majority and experts support it.

Sweden is. Much of Africa will have little choice but to muddle through.

We'll likely get a good idea of what the "no or low response" route looks like.

You're right, but I'd classify Sweden as medium response. They still have measures in place, just not as harsh.

With poorer countries (which applies to most of Africa), I guess it'll take several months or years until we know what the excess death rate was. Esp. in rural communities, that data probably often won't be reported as a Covid death. Even Northern Italy had an excess death rate 2x as high as the reported deaths and they had all the attention.

Sweden's decidedly more casual than other OECD / Eurozone countries. NPR were carrying a segment on it this morning.

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/13/833623311/in-sweden-a-differe...

Isn’t that exactly what Sweden is currently doing?

And currently backtracking on.

A couple links to support the parent comment.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1268263/sweden-coronavi...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8212365/Swedish-PM-...

Both these are tabloids and uses "considering" & "is looking at" just below the contradictory headlines. I'm Swedish and are browsing Swedish websites. Including the Public Service svt.se.

What new measures are they actually imposing? Neither of those articles has anything concrete.

The data both articles present for Sweden's death and infection rates also seem to suggest new measures might not be necessary (though admittedly the data seems pretty noisy; the recent drop in new deaths/infections could just be a fluke).

Uhm, no? I can't find anything in Swedish newspapers about harsher measures.

Sorry, I don't recall being democratically asked whether shutting down everything indefinitely was something I agreed with before it happened. Of course people will agree that it's a good idea when the media is blaring "PANDEMIC" at them 24/7.

"Of course" what? You're aware that different parts of the US have reacted very differently despite having similar national media blaring at them, right?

I was replying to this:

> But the polls I'm aware of show that the majority of people is supportive of measures nearly everywhere (I'm not aware of a poll that shows the opposite).

You weren't. But I'm sure pretty much all politicians got quick polls before enacting measures. That measures that strictly were enacted was only because politicians knew there wouldn't be large scale protests or riots.

Now I don't want to speculate why people are in favor. Maybe because they believe experts but that usually doesn't work well.. I guess public opinion during the outbreak is also going to be a heavily researched area for years to come.

You are correct that I have an emotional reaction to death, but I was not intending to spew a bunch of hyperbole.

Society isn’t a numbers game, it’s a shared set of values, and I find it appalling that we seem to be favoring the economy over human life. We have enough resources to take care of both, but chose to bail out corporations instead of people.

> we seem to be favoring the economy over human life

I really don't agree with this meme at all and the evidence doesn't support it whatsoever. The people that are hurt most by the shutdown are lower class service workers, not Wall Street stockbrokers. As I just mentioned, everyday people are hurting far more from the lockdown than from the virus. If you really cared about the average person, you'd want to get society running as soon as safely possible.

The idea that the government can support or pay for the salary of the entire/most of the population for a sustained period of time is also completely ludicrous and impossible.

The problem is that as the lock downs work, it's easy to lose sight of what could have been, they stop it getting out of control and it still looks bad as there was the initial clump of infections, but the abstract hundreds per day that are dying are still fairly remote for most of us as only 1%-2% of many of our populations got infected. One can still throw around figures of "it's less death than this" or "the lock down is causing X amount of economic + societal misery".

The scientific consensus seems to be that if the disease had just been left to run it's course, even with people being moderately careful given how infectious it is, it would have caused huge death figures. Perhaps that might be proved wrong when we see some countries that simply socially distanced instead of locking down, but was it ever worth the risk?

All these "well, it's bad, but look at the economic damage" have to be weighed against what could have been, not what is. And we just can't imagine this, we can say it, but how many of us can imagine 10,000s dead per day?

Your Aunt dead, a colleague dead and your best-friend's Dad dead, your Butcher's Grandmother dead, your barista's sister dead, a teacher at your primary school dead, your football team's goalie dead. And more, and more. Of the few hundred people you know you would have known several people who would have died, or the thousand or so you are a 2nd connection to you would have heard of many deaths.

On top of that all, New York and the UK only really have Italy and Spain to look at as any sort of predictor. They now have to watch just two countries to see what happens when they start easing the restrictions, and due to the massive lag between infection and hospitalisation/death and insufficient testing capacity, it's all still guess work.

Lift it a week or two too early, and you might have to go into another lock down in a few months time.

This isn't what the death statistics are showing, whatsoever. Unless your barista's sister, football team's goalie, etc. are all over 70 years old, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be dead. Your scenario is fear-mongering, plain and simple.

The Barista's sister would fall into the thousands (or even 10,000s) of 2nd connections you have, in which there will almost certainly be young deaths. The goalie might have had health complications. I personally know at least 2 people with diabetes, 2 with asthma, plus one post-cancer. Maybe I'm a little older than you, but many of us would know a young-ish person that would die (a quarter maybe if the 0.2% chance of 20-39 year old death is in the right order of magnitude).

Also, don't forget death rates would go up if a healthcare system collapses, which we haven't seen.

I think you're the delusional one, while your personal chance of dying is fairly low, you know hundreds of people, and those people know thousands more.

Are the chances of these people dying from COVID greater than other risks we take every single day, yet don't shut down society and curtail freedoms over?

That is really the only question that matters.

Yes, for example covid deaths in Scotland are 1/3 of all deaths, deaths in UK:

"The Office for National Statistics said that in the week to 3 April, 16,387 people died in England and Wales, an increase of 5,246 deaths compared with the previous week and 6,082 more than the five-year average."

And that's WITH a lock down, way before the massive peak that could have happened.

It's like you're stuck in the wishful thinking stage the rest of us were in two months ago.

The deaths in NY,LA,CA, and MI include many,many people under 70.

Also, you’ve responded several times without answering my question:

How many of your family, friends, and acquaintances are you willing to put up for the experiment?

Yes, many people under 70 have died. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, all of which are tragedies. People also die from a variety of other diseases, accidents, and other things on a regular basis in numbers that dwarf the coronavirus. Yet, we don't shut down society over it.

> How many of your family, friends, and acquaintances are you willing to put up for the experiment?

This kind of snarky comment is precisely the problem. I'm not "willing to put up my friends" for experiment, because this isn't some zero sum game with simple answers. As I have said a dozen times now: it is a complicated situation and this "but people are dying, so we have to be as draconian as possible" take is extremely shortsighted.

There are millions of people that will now have serious problems because of the total shutdown. Here's a number for you:

> 45,000 – or one in five – suicides a year worldwide to unemployment, with a further 5,000 deaths caused by the economic crisis.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/the-link-between-unem...

45,000 people a year kill themselves because of unemployment. And that's just after 2008. We are apparently headed for a far worse crisis.

Have you considered the possibility that completely shutting down everything for months on end will result in more chaos and death than the virus itself? Even worse, this is entirely unpredictable?

The comment was not hyperbolic. Since you believe that, that means you don't believe the projections (or maybe the current statistics). That's fine, but don't respond by denigrating on the wrong basis. Instead of accusing people of exaggerating things as if they have some kind of agenda, just be straightforward and say I don't believe those numbers.

You've made a ton of huge leaps here. The comment is hyperbolic because it's using the tried-and-true tactic of "People are dying!!" to push their view and denigrate others'.

As I said above: it's a complex issue. The consequences of shutting the world down just might be worse than the death toll of COVID. At the very least, it's a discussion worth having.

People literally are dying. That's not the parent's hyperbole, it's a fact. Official projections from health organizations indicate trends will continue. Again, not the parent's hyperbole. If you think it's hyperbole then that means you don't believe the official death numbers.

And "it's not a hyperbole" does not mean "it's not a complex issue" or "the alternative is better" or "it's not a discussion worth having". By all means, have your discussion. Point out that it's a complex issue like you already did. And if you dispute the claimed facts, dispute them and bring your own facts. If you don't, then just don't falsely accuse people of exaggerating them. Don't sling mud at factual arguments made in good faith; it's not difficult for others to reciprocate.

Even if we are willing to accept a certain number of deaths in order for the economy (and many families) to survive, the problem is that our hospitals can't handle the number of sick people that will result.

You will have bodies abandoned in the streets, like in Ecuador.