Except that we DIDN'T shut down the world. That was the whole damn problem in the US.

The Northeastern states actually shut down. They're now under 50 new cases per day per 1 million people. Their deaths are mostly flat (just slightly increasing) at this point. And I suspect a lot of that is now being imported.

The Southeastern states didn't do crap. They're mostly all above 200 new cases per day per million.

Then you have states like California that kinda/sorta shutdown. They're scattered about 100 new cases per day per million.

We could have stopped this. We could have been flat in number of deaths as of June 1 like most of the European countries.

But we didn't.

Instead, we're on the same trajectory as "shithole" (to borrow the MAGA terminology) countries like Brazil, India, and Mexico.

And, now states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arizona are on a trajectory to cross over states like Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts in terms of number of deaths per million.

And the economy is in a shambles anyway. So, lots of people died, and we got nothing for it.

It's interesting that the NE states seem to now be lauded when actually NJ, NY, MA and CT have the highest per-capita death rates [0] in the WORLD [1] by far despite significant lockdowns, comprehensive & early mask mandates and fairly conservative reopening (e.g. NYC).

Although New England seems to be doing well since earlier in the summer, we did NOT do well overall. For example, MA at #3 has had 8831 deaths for 6.9M people. The average age of the dead is 82, 65% of all deaths from long term care homes [2] -- this was a failure to protect the vulnerable.

As for NE cases being imported, we saw a small uptick on Cape Cod with vacationers (resulting in Baker's recent travel order) but the back-to-school has only found a few dozen positive cases over the last few weeks despite massive and ongoing testing [3].

I'm not sure your comment about "most of the European countries" is correct. France is seeing near-record cases [4] Spain has seen a very significant surge [5] resulting in a lockdown of the Barcelona area and Germany is also seeing a worrying uptick in cases [6].

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

[2] https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-september-1-2020...

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusMa/comments/ig1n1x/curre...

[4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/

[5] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/

[6] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/

> It's interesting that the NE states seem to now be lauded when actually NJ, NY, MA and CT have the highest per-capita death rates [0] in the WORLD [1] by far despite significant lockdowns, comprehensive & early mask mandates and fairly conservative reopening (e.g. NYC).

Back-modeling what happened in those states showed that the biggest problem those areas had is that (in New York, for example) when they thought they had Case Number 1 on March 1 they already had Case Number 10,000.

Even as late as March 15th, people in the New York mayor and governor's offices were screaming at each other because the data wasn't matching up and cases were appearing with no traceable cause--ie. general populace circulation was occurring.

The problem was that those areas needed to be locking down as of March 1 but because of poor data didn't get locked down until about 3 weeks later. This wasn't unusual: things like SXSW were still playing chicken with everybody until Austin pulled the plug on them--that was only like March 6th or so. And that's not a lockdown, that's just stopping an international travel event.

The sad part is that several states are about to surpass those per capita death numbers for RI, MA, and CT. That's inexcusable at this point.

And I really hope that no other state gets close to NY or NJ numbers. Sadly, unless a couple of those states do something NOW, they're going to.

This is nonsense. You completely disregard that the entire world's medical community has become vastly better at treating infectious people. In the early days, when NE states, Spain, Italy, etc. were hit hard, people who had to go to the hospital died at alarming rates. Since then, we have learned that prone position, dexamethasone, supplemental (non-intubated) oxygen, convalescent plasma, etc. contribute to vastly lower death rates. Of course per capita death rates are high in the NE states. We had no effective treatments then.

Minor note on Europe - Several European countries relaxed border travel restrictions and internal restrictions on dining / socializing in June in time for traditional summer holidays in July / August. Current surges are likely to be a result of relaxing of previous lockdown rules. For an early discussion of this see [1]

[1] https://fortune.com/2020/08/15/europe-covid-cases-second-wav...

Complete worldwide infections are 25 million that are known.

There's around a 40-50% asymptomatic number so the total estimated infections so far are around 40 million.

Total deaths is around 800,000.

.02 death rate on average and it drops drastically the younger a person is.

Depending on your risk tolerance, to many people, that's not worth destroying life as we know it.

Especially because the death rate of heart disease and cancer is higher than this and has easily targeted reasons with mountains of scientific evidence that could reduce the death rates.

It just seems like propaganda and we're making a bigger deal out of it than necessary.

Cancer and heart disease are not contagious like Covid-19 is, why is this ridiculous equating done so often? It’s apples to oranges...

Also, some studies seem to suggest we’re actually undercounting the death rate [0]. Combine that with likely under reported data in Russia, China, and other countries, it’s clearly a significant threat.

I think it’s kind of crazy to say preventing potentially 10s of millions of people from dying is not a big deal and propaganda. Seems like searching for a grand narrative in something that’s rather pretty cut and dry.

1. Death is not the only health problem caused by COVID-19. Patients who survive are also coming out with persistent lung damage and respiratory problems. Nobody knows the very long term (more than a year) health effects either.

2. “Destroying life as we know it” is a pretty dramatic way of saying “Stay home, wear a mask when you have to go out, and wait until things are better to get your nails done.” Plus, lots of people are not even doing that! They’re out horsing around anyway, putting more people at risk and further extending the crisis.

The math based on your figured is .02 as in 2%, not 0.02%, and that would indeed be pretty bad but there's a dramatic amount of undercounting of the survivors so your numbers are a bit pointless. (Also if to be fair we're lacking a lot of deaths particular in Russia, China, Iran etc.)

Comparing death rates doesn't mean much if the number infected for covid is orders of magnitude higher. Even if it turns out to be about .02%, we are looking at a death toll like the world has never seen if everyone gets infected. And that's not taking into account hospitals becoming overwhelmed and causing deaths to skyrocket.

It's the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.

And no one has ever shut down a fast food restaurant to prevent the propagation of heart disease.

It's bad but it's being severely over exaggerated.

Nice job repeating snappy talking points but this comparison is malicious, unfounded and indicates a bad faith argument.

You're personally attacking someone for making a genuine argument, as is clear from both its content and that person's messages elsewhere in this thread.

You may not like the comparison but to call it "malicious" is not OK. Play the ball, not the man.

Just doesn't make sense to me that we dont ban cigarettes, we don't ban fast food restaurants... Yet we shut down the entire economy and all of human life as we know it for something with less of the death rate than both of those illnesses.

And there's mountains of scientific evidence supporting those directly lead to their respective ailments.

How many of those factors spread on accident vs personal choice? ~300,000,00 in the US ~2% death rate .. 6,000,000? Is that enough bodies?

Where are you getting a 2% death rate or expectancy that 100% of the population will be infected?

The numbers I've seen are 0.66% death rate, with an average remaining life expectancy of about 10 years among those who die, and estimates that between 15% and 70% of the population would be infected.

70% of 0.66% of 328M is 1.5M deaths, or 15M years of life lost. That is indeed a big number.

Smoking has been estimated to reduce life expectancy by 13 years for heavy smokers. There are about 34M smokers in the US. I don't have the exact stats on number of heavy smokers and how long people smoke for, but assume that the average smoker smokes for 20 years and loses 5 years of life expectancy over that time. That's about 850,000 years of life lost _every single year_ to smoking alone.

I think the question of "would it be worth 5% of the current COVID-19 measures to stop smoking entirely for 1 year" is a valid one.

It would be if smoking was an infectious disease.

This activity smoking causes a disease.

Leaving quarantine causes a disease.

It's personal choice to do either activity and corona is the only disease where it's somehow the rest of the worlds responsibility for people making poor choices.

It's personal choice to leave quarantine but for some reason corona is the only disease where it's somehow the rest of the worlds responsibility for people making poor choices.

You act like there's an alternative. The only way out is through, it's all just delaying otherwise.