This may get downvoted, but I think the following judgement-free statement is true: this is starting to look scary/serious /solely/ because of the measures the governments are taking, and the media circus around it. Otherwise (while it would have almost certainly "started to look serious" eventually, probably for a short time), at this point, you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers.
Either you don't do anything and it eventually _gets_ serious, or you do something and it _looks_ serious.
> you would not have even noticed given the actual numbers.
Surely you'd notice if 15%+ of your family's elders died in one year. People don't seem to get that it's not so bad (health wise) as long as you take serious decisions to slow the spread, so yes, you're right, it _looks_ serious, because it is, and it would be much worse if governments didn't do anything about it.
That remains to be seen. The consequences of current actions, while the current impact of the virus itself is basically nil, will be severe, including extra deaths (and lack of births, for that matter - didn't occur to me to count that but looking at demographic articles I realized it's also lives lost in the net), and massive waste of life-years due to economic disruption that will disproportionately affect the developing world, the poor and the young. Which one is worse, I don't know, but over the last few days my opinion is starting to change towards the latter being worse.
> while the current impact of the virus itself is basically nil
You should read about Italy, and how they're running out of hospital beds. Which means usually non life threatening issues are getting much more serious.
It's not a boolean choice between "saving lives" and "saving the economy"... If you don't do anything: people get sick, sick people can't work, the economy tanks, hundred thousand people die. If you do something, less people get sick, the economy tanks anyway, but less people die. As it turns out it seems like most government prefer prioritizing human life over money.
Most of the cases of the infection are mild. Nothing has happened yet (yes, nothing - the number of deaths currently happening in Italy is still, statistically, a blip), and yet already more people are not working for weeks than what would if everyone got sick at the same time, given the working-age mortality and complications rate. And we haven't even started yet.
It hasn't seemed binary to me before about this weekend, but it's increasingly starting to seem binary as the over-reaction escalates.
You should not call the media a "circus" if you are trying to be judgement-free. So, removing judgement: this is starting to appear serious because of government actions and media reporting.
I find this to be personally true, because if the government and media had not informed me of this illness, I would be unaware and unconcerned.
I think you probably want some discussion of this point, but it is so plain and obvious it is hard to discuss.
I suspect you are trying to argue your personal judgement that the media is a "circus", that they are not justified in their reporting. That is not judgement-free and could use some supporting arguments.
That is fair, "circus" was a judgement.
Regardless, the main point stands. I tried to start a discussion in another thread; this post was mostly to bring more attention to the fact that the virus is not disrupting things at all at this point, the reaction to it is.
Your suggestion here and elsewhere has been that it would be ultimately less harmful overall to let the disease run unchecked, even if it kills millions in a few weeks that way, than to attempt to control it in the ways our various levels of government are doing.
I have yet to see you substantiate that claim in any way.
First of all, I made this suggestion in the other comment and I absolutely did substantiate it with numbers.
On the contrary, the responses I've received were
1) Point #2 below. That is fair.
2) Failing to read my post, e.g. saying healthcare will collapse while I already include that assumption.
3) Appeal to emotion like (literally) "[you are] not human" or "shit HN says"
If you have something better, I welcome you to comment on my other post.
Two new pieces of information I got since then:
1) Medical supplies are in danger because of the local disruption (e.g. local blood drives are cancelled in King County so they say the supply is collapsing), factory closures, and shipping disruption - again, the cure is worse than the disease and it just reinforces my point.
2) People noted that sudden death spike would cause economic disruption due to panic too, however I argue that
(a) without the media and govt attention at the early stage, the panic would be brief, (b) even after healthcare collapses, the panic and impact would be much less significant than now, as evidenced by Italian doctors on FB/Twitter being unhappy with the common reaction of reading the horror stories and then going out with friends.
AFAIK, covid-19 is basically a "slightly worse flu". Most people are not at risk of dying and in fact most people don't even need to go to the hospital to recover.
Surely there has to be a balance between protecting the vulnerable at the cost of ruining the economy and protecting the economy at the cost of ruining the vulnerable.
How about instead of shutting down planet earth we advise people over the age of 60 to self-quarantine for a few months. The disease will run its course and then they will be protected by herd immunity. Neighbors and friends can drop off supplies on the front doorstep during this time.
If you are ignorant of the virus, why talk about it like this?
50% of the patients in ICU are under 50, and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs.
If you don't take paranoid drastic measures, many millions will die.
If you do take paranoid drastic measures, lives will be saved, and then everyone will call you crazy for taking those measures because it ended up not that bad.
Just like people think Y2K was an overblown non-issue. Because it was fixed by millions of people working hard.
> and it causes permanent damage to your lungs and organs.
It's too early to know this for sure. I know personally, it took over two months for my lungs to recovery from pneumonia when I was younger. People are claiming this, but we won't know for a full year of this damage is non-recoverable.
But to your other point, yes a number of experts have said the really scary thing is the number of people in their 40s, who were healthy and non-smokers, who ended up on respirators in Italy and S Korea.
Also, since when was "just a flu" okay? The flu is really fucking bad. Twice in my life I had a flu take me out for over a week, and from the accounts of SARS-cov2, many are reporting it as feeling much worse than a flu with chills for days after.
And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days?
When the mortality rate is 0.2% for people < 60 years old, I just have a hard time believing that it requires the response we've been giving it. I would bet that for healthy, non-vulnerable adults (i.e. they don't have a pre-existing condition that makes them extra susceptible) the death rate is virtually 0%.
I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.
>And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days?
This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.
> I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.
Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?
1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis?
2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario.
I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb
My point (in the other thread, but this is going the same way) was that yes, if someone says let's have 100 people of all ages play Russian roulette (only the gun has 30-50 capacity, and also loaded guns mostly go to much older people), that is very bad.
But if the alternative is, we will instead take those 100 people and make them really miserable, make a few homeless and/or drug addicted, maybe have one commit suicide, starve a few of them, get a few divorced, and ruin a few lives completely - disproportionately affecting the young and children - let them play Russian roulette.
I am not convinced, but at this point to me it's looking more and more like that's the case.
Politicians (in NZ) are already saying it's going to be worse than 2008.
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The cost of the Soviet union collapsing (a purely economic disaster I can really relate to, even though I do think Soviet union disappearing was a great thing as such) in Russia was 3-5 years of life expectancy, over a decade, for EVERYONE. How many lives is that? Not counting the missing births and the knock-on effects of both, as well as the total waste of life that the 90ies in Russia were for many people.
You are taking my Russian roulette analogy way too literally. The "bullet" is not literally just dead people, it's also the economic impact of letting this disease run rampant, which you are clearly not accounting for.
We aren't just shutting everything down to save lives, we're shutting everything down because we some reason to believe that if 70% of the population gets this disease in a very short amount of time 20% of them are hospitalized, and at least 2% die (in truth, the CFR would skyrocket if we don't flatten the curve), the societal and economic havoc would be much worst than the one resulting from these government imposed quarantines. At the highest end of the risk spectrum, it could be orders of magnitude worst. Do we know that for sure? No, hence the Russian roulette analogy: some chance of extremely high risk, esp. when it comes to the entire planet: NOT WORTH GAMBLING.
If you think that world leaders are currently sacrificing the economy just to save lives, you are not paying attention to what they have been doing.
> This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.
No, it's not "easily available". There's data flying around everywhere from different countries as this situation rapidly evolves and you can torture it to tell any story you want. If the data is so easily available, couldn't you have at least linked your source?
> Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?
The "experts" in this case have never dealt with a global pandemic of this scale before. So they are inexperienced experts giving it their best guess based on what they know about disease transmission and math. But they clearly did not factor in the effects of shutting down the global economy for 3-6 months in their quest to optimize for a single variable. I'm sure we'll have a lot of "lessons learned" after this is all over and the experts will be much more experienced the next time around...
True, this is only in China. In most other countries, it's still too early to be able to collect great data because of how quickly the situation is evolving (the denominator is bound to be wrong due to delays between cases being detected and the amount of days it takes before cases evolve into severe/critical condition or death). But it's data, and you can't easily dismiss it.
> So they are inexperienced experts giving it their best guess based on what they know about disease transmission and math.
This isn't entirely true. The epidemics in China, South Korea have more or less been resolved, and many of the steps being taken in other countries are based on comparing the outcomes in those countries compared to ones that are failing to slow the spread of the disease with disastrous consequences (Italy).
> But they clearly did not factor in the effects of shutting down the global economy for 3-6 months in their quest to optimize for a single variable.
It's possible that the health experts are not taking the economical windfall into account, but the politicians enacting the laws probably are. These decisions are being made in rooms with people who, with their knowledge pooled together, most likely have more information about the disease and the economic impact of their decisions than you.
Secondly, the reasoning for national shutdowns earlier rather than later is to shorten their length. As of now, local government officials are hoping not advocating 3-6 month shut down, but rather trying to avoid one by shutting down now. I remember reading the figure of 2 weeks but I cannot find it quickly now. We will see.
We already have the best case (South Korea) and worst case scenarios (Italy) in front of us. Each country affected is shutting down so not to become another Italy.
If you're not aware of the situation there, I really urge you to look it up - doctors are saying they're having to choose who has the best survival chance to give attention to.
> Just like people think Y2K was an overblown non-issue. Because it was fixed by millions of people working hard.
Y2K was an actual issue? I thought it was purely artificial issue created by computer layman. Year 2038 is an actual issue and there's really not much fuss about it, for many years.
It is not a slightly worse flu though. There are numerous experts in record pointing to it's long incubation time, that some people are asymptomatic, that it may be airborne, the death rate... It is not normal seasonal flu and it demands a different response. Now, what that response is can be debated, but it should be more than doing nothing.
To be pedantic, it's not airborne. It's a respiratory virus. An airborne virus can linger in the air, possibly for hours or even a day. It's much much more transmissible.
The danger with SARS-cov2 is that, when going back to some of these cities where the first patients appeared, WHO researchers have found people with large viral load in their throats, and they didn't develop symptoms for over a week! So just being within 3~4 feet of them breathing could spread the disease. Sure, it's less likely than if they coughed or you shook hands, but it's still dangerous.
Sorry this is not a "slightly worse flu". The "Spanish Flu" was both less virulent and less deadly and killed ~50 million world-wide. This is the mostly deadly pandemic since the "Black Death" of medieval times.
It's no where near the Black Death. From what I've heard from multiple people are the limits are most likely a lower bound of 0.6% and an upper of maybe 1.5%.
That's still a lot of people. America is ~330 million. 1% is more than 3 million. Assuming only 1/3 of Americans get infected, there could still be an upper bound of a million people dying (although it'll more like be 300k ~ 1m with all the efforts to spread out everything).
You can't just cherry-pick South Korea's case fatality rate because it's convenient to your argument. The case fatality rate worldwide is currently 3.7%. Regardless of what the reasons for that may be and whether it will remain the same, that is a cold, hard, fact about the current reality.
The difference is that for regular flu we have vaccines, herd immunity, and medicines that work. We have none of those things for COVID-19. The effect of that is to drive up hospitalization rates to the point that it's a DDoS on the healthcare system. People suffering from unrelated issues now can't get care on time, and some of them will die too.
We don't even know for certain if getting it once makes you immune. How do you know herd immunity will work if you don't have the answer to something basic like that?
Isolating just over-60s only works to some extent. What about the healthcare and nursing home workers whom they interact with?
No, we're treating it as serious because educated guesses say it is, and unfortunately, because of the lack of testing capacity, we can't do any better than that. We're taking measures that are proportional to the problem as measured in countries that have the capacity to measure it. When we're in the dark scrambling around with a lighter trying to find the light switch, it doesn't mean much that we can't see the problem.
