Is he really comparing the absolute number of deaths rather than the mortality rate? Come on Elon, you can do better than this.
Seems logical, though, that someone as self-centered and egomaniacal as Musk thinks of individual risk.
Cars are in what … top three or so causes of death alongside heart disease and cancer?
Deaths from COVID-19 is the USA are only going to beat that number if the government truly screws the pooch in terms of testing, treatment and management.
Wash your hands.
Currently COVID-19 response is a finely tuned balance of economic impact to death-toll. React too early and you'll experience an unacceptable economic impact. React too late and you'll experience an unacceptable death-toll.
The reason this situation is so dire is not because of the lethality of the virus. It is because our medical infrastructure is not capable of treating patients in the capacity that this virus can infect them. The goal is not to prevent people from contracting COVID-19. The goal is to slow the spread of COVID-19 so that the number of cases which require hospitalization stays lower than the availability of hospital beds.
If everyone got sick all at once the fatality rate would increase because people would be dying faster than they could be treated. So long as we can treat our ill faster than people become ill we can manage this situation even if 100% of humans eventually become infected. The balancing act comes into play when you also need to consider the impact to the economy.
There is a saturation point that early responding countries will reach where even if they continue to increase their response they will only be increasing their economic impact without significantly decreasing the death-toll. Finding this balance is what governments are trying to do right now.
Consider that cars are an endemic condition with a vast amount of time and money spent keeping people safe while using them or being near them. If similar resources are deployed to protect people from C19, there will be far fewer deaths from that than cars.
At work the simple precautions are to wash your hands, hold meetings by phone, by email or not at all, and avoid socialising with people you are not directly working with. Wash your hands, wash your work surfaces.
They key here is limiting the spread of the disease while the health system ramps up support. There is no need to go into wild-eyed panic and insist that we shut cities down. Doing so would cause far more problems (and fatalities) than COVID-19 ever will.
Plus, one defector company when all the others shut down and stop the spread gets a huge advantage, by passing on externalities to all the rest, so it is a selfish move as well.
Hmm! Maybe we should stop doubling down on automobile oriented infrastructure and rely on something safer instead.
With that said, the real comparison is the Flu that had 24,981 deaths in the 2016/17 season.
US is just 2 weeks from that.
In 3 weeks time, those probabilities might have changed.
My behaviour today should reflect probabilities today, and my behaviour in 3 weeks should reflect probabilities then.
My behaviour today has negligible impact on my chances in 3 weeks too.
Collective behaviour might effect collective probabilities in 3 weeks, but even that is relatively minimal considering the nature of exponentials.
In any case, Elon Musk doesn't speak for individual behavior, he controls a company of thousands of employees. That's already collective behavior.
That’s the thing that makes this analysis nonsensical. You are looking at the first 2 months of an exponential and treating it like a fixed rate. You should treat it as an exponential and extrapolate another 10 months with number of cases doubling every 4-6 days and then use that number as the deaths per year.
I’m honestly blown away that Musk is saying this.
- on 8 Apr US will be just under 1000 deaths. Scary, but that’s almost a month away - on 2 May, deaths will be ~15,000 - on 20 May, deaths will be ~125,000 - on 7 June, deaths will be ~1,000,000 - on 1 July, deaths will be ~16,000,000 - on 19 July, deaths will be ~128,000,000 - by end of 2020, deaths would be over 17,000 trillion if the US population was infinite and mitigating factors such as herd immunity didn’t kick in, but you get the general idea
This is all presuming the existing political/societal response and herd immunity not kicking in (which it won’t in the US until around the 200MM mark). Social distancing will lessen this massively, which is why it’s so important.