Yeah, let me rephrase. COVID is the deadliest thing most people will ever have a chance of coming into contact with, you'll spread it to others before you even know you have it, thus it's almost certain you won't be the only one "taking the risk". It's not like driving, flying, takeaway, or any other inane, minimizing comparison. It is a highly infectious, stealthy, lethal pathogen. If we let everyone get it, at even .5% fatality rate, that's millions and millions of people dead just in the US alone. It kills everyone, infants, the elderly, the healthy, the comorbid, just at different rates.

Here is what you should do:

- shelter in place

- if you must go out, wear masks and gloves, stay at least six feet away from others if possible, and wash your hands thoroughly when you return

- lots of places need volunteers, please help them if you can and follow their safety protocols

- donate money to funds for responders and local business/community relief

Here's what you shouldn't do:

- flout shelter in place orders

- minimize the risk in public forums

- engage in armchair epidemiology; this isn't like having an opinion on tabs vs spaces

I'm sympathetic to (indeed terrified by) the economic destruction of this, and I know it's happening right now. Let's stay alive and keep each other alive first. We'll figure the rest out later.

> We'll figure the rest out later.

When? As far as I know, no one has provided any quantifiable goal post for when it’s safe to stop lockdown.

When we have a plan that doesn't involve the likely death of thousands of people.

I get it's frustrating to not have a timeline and that the stakes are high. But as shitty as it's gonna sound, life's not fair.

But in terms of metric, people are actually talking about what stats to look at, mainly the reproduction rate (Cuomo refers to it as infection rate in his watch the dial slide) vs. hospital capacity. Angela Merkel went on at some length about it. But it'll take time, and to avoid new waves, we need testing, and I haven't heard anything about US plans for that, which honestly scares me.

There's been some testing. It generally shows that _way_ more people have (or had) COVID-19 than we thought, and that most of the cases are so mild that people never even knew they were sick.

NYC Hospitals find that 15% of pregnant women have COVID-19: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/04/20/new... That particular article doesn't mention it, but other reports I've heard of said only about 1 in 8 of that 15% were symptomatic.

In Chelsea, MA, 30% of 200 random people tested positive, 1/2 reported no symptoms at all: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/17/business/nearly-third...

Here's a general article pointing out that this is very likely to not be as big of a deal as we thought it'd be: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-many-people-h...

> most of the cases are so mild that people never even knew they were sick

These studies don't add up, and there have been numerous criticisms of them referenced elsewhere in this discussion.

Just in your post, you're suggesting that 1 in 8 of infections are asymptomatic /and/ that 1 in 2 are asymptomatic. Those are very different figures.

Anecdotally, friends and acquaintances of mine who have had the disease are reporting that contact between people is very likely to result in a symptomatic infection.

Take the UK cabinet as a "public anecdote": the UK PM got the disease (and required intensive care), the PM's fiancee had to isolate with symptoms, so did the UK health minister, and the chief medical officer who shared the PM's press conferences, and the PM's chief advisor.

I don't know how many people Boris Johnson was in close contact with, but that outcome feels consistent with the 40-50% asymptomatic cases assumed by e.g. the Imperial study. It could easily be a bit outside that range, but it doesn't feel consistent with the idea that vastly more people are asymptomatic than not.

Of course, we need good data rather than anecdotes, and hopefully we'll get them soon. My money is on less than 50% asymptomatic though.

All that the antibody studies have shown is that antibody studies grossly overestimate the number of people that have COVID-19.

If the studies are accurate, only 1/600 affected people die... Which means that every single man, woman, and child in NYC has already been infected, and that the death rate will drop to zero tomorrow. I find that rather difficult to believe.

Yeah it's probably better to look at health care workers in this case: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/15/8349200...

Can I check what you think gloves will achieve?

Yeah! A major way people spread things is through their hands, so wearing gloves and taking them off before you get home helps you not bring it inside. You can then remove your mask and wash your hands.

That’s actually not true. We are talking 0.2-0.3% lethality which is still a lot but it will bellow 250k deaths even if we are back to full normal right now.

Current estimations are 60-70k deaths from it but the doubling of suicides resulting of lockdowns this year to 100k make us more likely to die from suicide than covid-19.

I think those numbers are way low. Based on demographic numbers:

Older than 85: 650k deaths

65-84: 150k

55-65: 400k

I don't think everyone will be infected, but lets say it's half. That's 600k. Let's say it's 10%. That's 120k. By any measure, the loss of life is... just breathtaking. But either way, parent was taking about letting everyone get it to build herd immunity, so that's where "everyone gets it" is coming from.

https://www.livescience.com/is-coronavirus-deadly.html

> the doubling of suicides resulting of lockdowns this year to 100k make us more likely to die from suicide than covid-19

This had been circling the internet a little, but I would caution against extrapolating an uptick in suicides into doubling by the end of the year. There are no doubt consequences to sheltering in place, domestic abuse is a concern as well for example. But this is the best we've got.

Do you have citations to back up those numbers? I've been looking for things to read that try to quantify the potential harm of shelter-in-place orders, but haven't found much that go anywhere beyond wild guesses.

Yeah! Well, not the suicides. The stuff I found was like "9 suicides in Tennessee" (which is tragic but not indicative) and a lot of coverage of Trump's lies about it. But COVID-19 I used:

https://www.livescience.com/is-coronavirus-deadly.html

and

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...

Feel free to check my math, it's late and I did some pretty sketchy rounding.

> the doubling of suicides resulting of lockdowns this year to 100k

There's no evidence that suicides are doubling.

Are you personally willing to be civilly and criminally liable if you injure someone by transmitting a disease to someone despite the known risk? You have to be so willing when you drive; and you can usually find an insurer to cover your civil liabilities.

If you can’t find an insurer to indemnify you if you make someone ill, that should tell you something about the level of harm you could cause someone else.

> you take the lives of everyone in your car and those around you in your hands while driving.

The key point there is that you do that with their consent. Also you are required to be insured to cover you in the case that you screw up and hurt or kill people. Please show me the insurance company that will cover you if you recklessly spread COVID-19 to someone who then dies.

I don't consent to you risking my life and the lives of people I care about just because you're getting a little cabin fever.

> you take the lives of everyone in your car and those around you in your hands while driving.

Says who? The data we have so far does not support (or refute) that. We just do not know yet.

> But the economic costs - the careers and education opportunities lost to regular people will impact their whole lives.

Yes, that's potentially true. But if you want to be persuasive, you're going to need to quantify that, with error bars and probabilities. We have pretty solid estimates as to how many people are likely to die based on various social distancing, shelter-in-place, full quarantine, etc. scenarios. Those lost lives can't be "fixed" after they're gone.

Economic harm can be lessened and even fixed. No, I do not have confidence that everyone will be made whole after this; unfortunately governments and people in general are far from perfect. But that's not an excuse to take other actions that will directly cause deaths.

What about the lives lost to the increased rates of suicide and drug/alcohol abuse that will accompany an economic collapse?

We have tools to combat an economic collapse. The defense we have against COVID is to shelter in place until we get a huge testing system up and running (which we currently don't have a plan for).

Very unlikely NY is anywhere close to herd immunity as the number of those infected is probably well under half the population.