Because it tells a very interesting story how many lives we're willing to accept to be lost in normal circumstances.
Cars, air pollution, avoidable infections, ... - there's a lot of harm society could avoid and doesn't.
And the people who benefit are the ones in power, whereas the ones who suffer are the ones without power.
So the trade offs are largely not accepted because they are acceptable to society at large, but because the people who have the power to make the decisions are insulated from it.
In the US wealth is a decent proxy for power, so this claim can actually easily be quantified.
Simply draw maps correlating the wealth of a neighborhood with the adverse effect being discussed. Whether it’s air pollution levels, or it’s deaths due to car accidents, or mercury in water, or lead in walls, it will invariably be the case the problem correlated strongly with the wealth of the area.
Inspiration did come from The Narrow Corridor[1], which has a good history of the building of state capacity in Europe, and how it affected trade. In particular, cost falls, which is one way “attacked and/or killed by bandits” could be proxied. Another thing that drives down cost is reducing the number of tolls along the road, as discussed in this paper:
https://mason.gmu.edu/~mkoyama2/About_files/StateCapacitySur...
So again, while I don’t think that it’s a stretch to assume traders who had to cross dangerous territories accounted for the dangers, I don’t have a direct source. :-)
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/555400/the-narrow-c...
I'm still waiting to see what has happened to the number of deaths caused by heart attack, stroke, etc. that aren't COVID related. I'm betting those causes of death have dropped by about the same amount of COVID deaths.
A theory in that article is that it's likely to due to undiagnosed CORVID deaths from effects it can have on the entire respiratory system.
Elective in this case doesn’t mean cosmetic, it means an appointment was booked at a certain time. The procedures are still necessary.
Hospitals are in fact mostly empty. It’s just the COVID units which were overwhelmed, and even there, most EDs across the US were never overwhelmed, and none of them across the country are currently overwhelmed.
If your hospital is empty, it’s because of the actions you took. Stop doing those actions, and your neighborhood will soon look like mine soon.
This thing of going to come in so many waves because humans seem to be incapable of not just learning from the past, but also the present.
What actions do you mean? Move out from downtown to suburbs?
Without significant efforts to lower the R value (Aka the actions I alluded to; facial covering, social distancing, track and trace) - it’s only a matter of when, not if.
Minus a wonderful medical breakthrough, come find me next winter and let’s see how sure you are with such a quip.
Oh, and by then, a great expense to life, the cities will likely have reached herd immunity, but I won’t quip back, as it would be in bad taste.
I am hopeful that they will find that they are already well into the prevalence range of herd immunity. If so, that will put them, to use a turn of the phrase, ahead of the curve. It would also mean that they didn't really flatten anything at all, and they could suspend their shutdown immediately.
If they are only at low single digit prevalence, that would be truly very bad news indeed.
If they're somewhere in the middle, say, 25-35% prevalence, then they could get through it with one more surge, or draw it out indefinitely. In that case it will be interesting to see which path they choose.