I’ve been comparing flu stats for Australia. 2019 a BAD flu season was over 400 deaths. A NORMAL season is roughly 150 deaths. I think 146 in 2018. 2020 has 36 deaths.
Melbourne deaths peaked at 25 for a single day. The current outbreak in VIC totally blows past the flu death rate for the entire country.
Total COVID deaths in Australia (450) already matches a bad flu season in a “locked down” environment and we still have 5 months to go for 2020.
Thankfully in Australia it’s possible to make mask wearing mandatory.
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject...
When I was trying to google data I don’t think I ever came across the ABS site in the results. 2016 was also 400ish deaths.
The flu certainly makes for a better comparison for discussion's sake than something like smallpox or the bubonic plague. Let's not forget the Spanish flu was also a flu.
When you look at overall mortality it's not similar to the flu. It's worse. Covid is a bigger killer, with a major reason being the lack of population resistance, vaccination, treatment protocols etc.
I think most discussion misses this point, it is similar in some ways and not in others.
In my view a rational and evidence-based approach would have focused on protecting vulnerable populations from day one. Such policies received little emphasis. Instead, we panicked and implemented measures that destroyed the jobs of healthy people who were living paycheck to paycheck. It's hard to imagine a worse response than one that fails to focus on the core problem and injures millions in the process.
Saying its just a flu, also discounts the potential life long impacts of a COVID infection, which appears to damage the hearts and lungs of some people who survived.
The broader point is, that there is no one right answer, all answers cause pain and suffering for different groups. To dumb it down to a black and white response does a massive disservice.
Can't really make a comparison with a long standing disease when covid19 is still doing its first rounds.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat...
How many more quarter millions of souls is a sufficient amount to sacrifice on behalf of gym fetishists?
(I was planning a return to the gym following an involuntary multi-year lapse this past January. On advising my doctor I was delaying plans, their first response was to dismiss my concerns as germophobic. They've since apologised.)
However, I do want to address the young and increased social isolation and mental illness. Took my toddler for an annual checkup recently and asked about all this as he's been out of daycare since March and had concerns about development.
The pediatrician's answer, which I found compelling was: this is a big deal, and it's going to have an impact, and therefore we should be a little lax to help create some comfort around the house. That said, all the psychologists in the world are looking at this and starting to work on the impact and how we get kids back to "normal" or ease the harm this has on them. There is going to be expertise and guidance on this.
Of course, that likely doesn't apply to the anti-science crowd.
I am remarkably lucky. I am fairly resilient and being stuck working from home hasn't negatively impacted my mental health. I've been promoted during the crisis. I am financially secure.
Not everyone is like me. Many people have suffered horribly due to the crisis, becoming unemployed, unable to see friends, they don't have their usual coping mechanisms. My point was, how we choose to deal with this is a choice, each choice has consequences. Currently we are saving older lives, at the expense of damaging the futures of younger generations. Is this the right balance? I don't know. I don't claim to know. But as a society, this is what we need to answer, how valuable is each human life.
Should we choose harsh lockdowns to extend the lives of older people by x years on average? What is the cost in economic and mental health harm to younger generations? How do we balance these needs?
These are the discussions we should be having, instead of decrying anyone who disagrees with the harshest of measures as a witch.
Looking at current number of deaths as the outcome for the decision to open stuff up only makes sense if you think we would have seen the same infection rate.
If the infection rate is high enough and fast enough, we surpass the healthcare system's capacity to help with hospitalization, and then we see a large increase in the mortality rate for those infected, as some of those with bad, but not fatal infections that recovered in the hospital don't recover out of the hospital. The faster the spread, the worse (higher) that number is.
> The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation.
People come back from vacations. The economic impact would be more like those people all quit at the same time.
> it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.
It is. They're looking at worst case scenarios for COVID-19, and how likely they are, compared to worst case scenarios for the economy, and how likely they are.
Worst case for the economy is a depression, which may take years or decades to recover from, but the workers are still there, still trained, and we can hopefully get them back to work with stimulus, even if it takes a long time.
Worst case for COVID-19 is that instead of hundreds of thousands of dead, we see millions of dead. What's the economic impact of one of every 50 or 100 families loses a parent, and how that affects they flexibility and ability to recover from financial bumps? What's the impact to Apple or Google if a high level exec that's spears a division dies (what's happened at Apple since Job died, and he had plenty of time to groom a successor)? What about the 20 employees of small business that was struggling but surviving when the owner dies? The economic impact of people actually disappearing forever is sometimes equivalent of the cost and time to train a replacement (which is generally multiple months of salary for any non-trivial position), and that's when it can actually be replaced adequately.
Even if you want to completely ignore the humanitarian aspect of it, there's good economic reason to not want people to die, and why locking things down, while economically disastrous, maybe still be less economically disastrous than NOT doing so.
That's fine. People are going to do what they're going to do. I'm not quite willing to let them do it behind nonsense arguments and justifications though.
If someone's unwilling to give up going to the gym, so be it. When they couch it (as some have here) as them actually doing it for the benefit of everyone else by helping the economy, I'm going to loudly and vehemently call bullshit.
If they say they just aren't willing to change and don't care about any of the data, well as long as they actually know the data, then I'll have nothing more to discuss with them.
That said, I don't think this is how people are. I think people are living in a deep cognitive dissonance and refusing to see the facts, not acknowledging them and saying they don't care.
That's not a policy problem, that a problem of educating people that do not want to be educated. Should the rest of the populace just shift our views away from reality so people that don't want to face it can get a better deal out of some policy? That won't lead to an acceptable outcome either, when the policy in question is about public safety.
Preventable deaths.
> American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.
I would say it's deeper than that. American society has been poisoned by individuality to the point where no one wants to do anything to help one another if it doesn't benefit them. It feels there's no concept of civic sense or societal good. Everyone just wants to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences.
Ask me to inconvenience myself for someone else? Fuck you buddy I got mine /s
I know this is a morbid topic, but it gets to a fundamental truth. How valuable is a human life? Is it worth significantly damaging the future of the young through economic depression and increased social isolation and mental illness to extend the life old old people by a year, 5 years?
There is no easy solution. We can hibernate as much of the non-essential economy with lock-downs and mandate the wearing of masks. But this, will extend the economic hardship we are under, which will put further economic strain on young people, who now have had to contend with the great recession and now likely a depression. We can do like sweeden and try and isolate and protect the vulnerable, and keep the economy open, or we can do nothing. Each of these choices has trade-offs in terms of economic hardship and lives. Not just the lives of people who get COVID, but those who commit suicide due to social isolation, economic hardship, and other factors related to COVID.
American's can't have this discussion in a mature manner because it has been poisoned by politics.