Those are unfortunately baked into our accounting, much like “killed by bandits” was accounted for in medieval trade until states started being able and willing to provide meaningful security.

But the assumptions in many of them were made a long time ago and don't necessarily apply anymore. In the case of air pollution for example, there probably exists a price that could be paid to significantly reduce it and improve the overall health of everyone.

The issue is that the price is paid by a set of people who are different from the people who benefit from this.

And the people who benefit are the ones in power, whereas the ones who suffer are the ones without power.

So the trade offs are largely not accepted because they are acceptable to society at large, but because the people who have the power to make the decisions are insulated from it.

In the US wealth is a decent proxy for power, so this claim can actually easily be quantified.

Simply draw maps correlating the wealth of a neighborhood with the adverse effect being discussed. Whether it’s air pollution levels, or it’s deaths due to car accidents, or mercury in water, or lead in walls, it will invariably be the case the problem correlated strongly with the wealth of the area.

I don’t disagree. But we seem to be bad at re-evaluating old decisions (definitely in my case), and it doesn’t help when politics is basically a team sport in the US.

I didn't know that "killed by bandits" was a standard in medieval trade logs! Is there a book or article you could happen to recommend to learn more about that?

I was not being literal, though I’m fairly sure I’m right for some not-too-loose definition of the term.

Inspiration did come from The Narrow Corridor[1], which has a good history of the building of state capacity in Europe, and how it affected trade. In particular, cost falls, which is one way “attacked and/or killed by bandits” could be proxied. Another thing that drives down cost is reducing the number of tolls along the road, as discussed in this paper:

https://mason.gmu.edu/~mkoyama2/About_files/StateCapacitySur...

So again, while I don’t think that it’s a stretch to assume traders who had to cross dangerous territories accounted for the dangers, I don’t have a direct source. :-)

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/555400/the-narrow-c...

Great thanks for the references!

Yes. We’re at about 95% of “plan”.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm

> The more interesting question is: Will we come ahead in lives saved without the covid measurements.

I'm still waiting to see what has happened to the number of deaths caused by heart attack, stroke, etc. that aren't COVID related. I'm betting those causes of death have dropped by about the same amount of COVID deaths.

I saw an article that they are up a lot. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/13/deaths-f...

A theory in that article is that it's likely to due to undiagnosed CORVID deaths from effects it can have on the entire respiratory system.

At least in some European countries where COVID cases has submerged the healthcare system, it is a very bad time to have a stroke or a car accident since the ER rooms are full and a lot of hospital resources are diverted to fight the pandemic. So it increases the mortality of these other situations.

I’m not sure that’s true https://youtu.be/sN6Trgzf9kY

Not sure how this is a contradiction to what the previous poster said. There is a huge variation across Europe and across regions of each country. There are regions where the medical system is completely overloaded. Northern Italy, central Spain and France. It plays a huge role, what phase of the pandemic a country is in. The peak of hospital load is clearly yet to come in the UK. Also, as the vlogger says, people are coming less to the hospitals with non-covid diseases, partially because the local docters are loaded.

In the UK people are delaying seeking medical help for things like stroke or heart attack. At the moment we think these deaths are going to increase.

The problem here is overwhelmed hospitals.

It’s interesting also to note that even hospitals are going bankrupt during all of this, as the vast majority of the money is made on “elective” procedures.

Elective in this case doesn’t mean cosmetic, it means an appointment was booked at a certain time. The procedures are still necessary.

Hospitals are in fact mostly empty. It’s just the COVID units which were overwhelmed, and even there, most EDs across the US were never overwhelmed, and none of them across the country are currently overwhelmed.

I live around 10 blocks from Brooklyn Hospital Center and I assure you the entire hospital, including atriums, waiting rooms, hallways and even meeting rooms are packed with patient beds.

If your hospital is empty, it’s because of the actions you took. Stop doing those actions, and your neighborhood will soon look like mine soon.

This thing of going to come in so many waves because humans seem to be incapable of not just learning from the past, but also the present.

> because of the actions you took

What actions do you mean? Move out from downtown to suburbs?

Given enough time, an unchecked virus with the attributes of this Coronavirus will saturate through semi-rural and even rural populations. It’s it might take more time, but that’s usually coupled with more spread out medical services.

Without significant efforts to lower the R value (Aka the actions I alluded to; facial covering, social distancing, track and trace) - it’s only a matter of when, not if.

Minus a wonderful medical breakthrough, come find me next winter and let’s see how sure you are with such a quip.

Oh, and by then, a great expense to life, the cities will likely have reached herd immunity, but I won’t quip back, as it would be in bad taste.

New York is starting randomly sampled antibody testing this week.

I am hopeful that they will find that they are already well into the prevalence range of herd immunity. If so, that will put them, to use a turn of the phrase, ahead of the curve. It would also mean that they didn't really flatten anything at all, and they could suspend their shutdown immediately.

If they are only at low single digit prevalence, that would be truly very bad news indeed.

If they're somewhere in the middle, say, 25-35% prevalence, then they could get through it with one more surge, or draw it out indefinitely. In that case it will be interesting to see which path they choose.