You can't argue against measure X by using the successful results of X to say that X didn't work in the first place!
And right that the question is to compare the actual death toll to the death toll that would have happened without social distancing. Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). That's 250,000 additional deaths. That would be $100M per death averted assuming a $2.5T cost of the social distancing measures - that's ~10% of GDP. The US so far is expecting losses about twice that.
There is substantial evidence for other viral infections that infection severity (spanning from asymptomatic to dead) is related to dosage.
There is limited information so far for covid19 but some informal evidence that this is true for it too: Young healthcare workers appear to be dying a a much higher rate than similarly healthy members of the public who are sars-cov-2 positive.
If this is the case, social distancing will reduce the number of people who get serious infections and reduce the number who die.
Even if not, preventing overload of the hospitals will significantly reduce the number who die. Delaying infections until we better know how to treat the disease from anti-virals to simply care techniques will almost certantly reduce the number who die.
> Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). T
CDC's projection was 1.7 million dead before accounting for hospital overload.
If you have a study that projects what the fatalities would have been with a shorter isolation period (e.g. only march and first two weeks of April), that would be noteworthy. Pointing to this early CDC study as a figure for what would have transpired had the economy not been shut down is not sound.
1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coro...
Not so, for example the mortalities from the diamond princess are _higher_ than the ones being used to drive those projections. The fact that it takes time for people to die has held down the estimated mortality during exponential case growth.
Effectively every reputable source is observing that the early death rate projections were substantially inflated. China's reported death rate is 0.5% - and they're the ones with the most experience with the virus. Germany only recent started random testing. They previously had a fatality rate of 2%, but after random testing they found that 14% of the population already had antibodies - thus lower the death rate down to 0.37% [1]. There's a vast difference between asking "out of the people who got sick enough to go to the hospital, what portion people infected with coronavirus died?" and "what portion of people infected with coronavirus died".
You're using old data. 2% of the diamond princess infected have died so far. Another 7% of the infected are still reported as not recovered yet.
I would love to be able to look inside your head and see what you think society would look like right now in the middle of an uncontained global pandemic with everyone just going about business as usual, continuing to pack bars and restaurants, no companies cutting back on jobs, etc. It's an utter, complete fantasy land.
That figure includes all mortality from pneumonia, a minority of which is caused by the seasonal flu.
The idea that the economy would collapse due to the amount of people dying of coronavirus does not hold water. Even if widespread infection did occur, the mortality rate among working age people is well below 1%.