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>It kills less than a percent of the people it infects.
At 30% population infected, 1% is more than a million people.
I'm sorry, our values seems radically different.
>Do you have any idea how stupid most people are?
I thought I did, but reading your comment did bring an enhanced understanding.
> Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us?
Actually, I don't. I've seen a lot of people make the argument that lockdowns and other restrictions are "too expensive", but:
* I have not seen a single serious attempt to model quite how expensive they will be.
* Nor have I seen any attempts to model how expensive alternate approaches would be, e.g. the Swedish model. Quite a few people who propagate it seem to be under the impression that this is implemented with zero economic disruption, but that's definitely not the case.
* And to be truly realistic, the models should consider the capabilities of countries to mitigate economic consequences through fiscal or monetary means. Many countries can currently borrow at very low or even negative interest rates, so they may have considerable leverage there.
How about the fed's estimate of a ~5% hit to GDP in Q2.
The economic ramifications of the shelter-in-place are going to be massive.
Put that way, it's a hell of a deal. Killing off 1% of the population, plus the economic damage of nobody wanting to go out because of fear of getting sick, and that's unimaginably worse than 5% for a quarter, economically. Of course there are are likely to be knock on effects for several quarters, but given the typical lifespan of a human, we could go several years of 5% less GDP before it would equal the economic cost of the loss of life. Not to mention the social cost, which is hard to assign a value to.
It makes me think of other comparisons. Imagine if we had terror attacks that killed 60,000 people a year if we worked to stop them, but several million people if we didn't work to stop them. How much did we decide to spend on wars in response to 9/11, and his manu soldiers of our own did we decide to kill in military actions, and how many foreign innocent civilians? It really puts 5% GDP into perspective, as almost a nothingness compared to what we willingly sacrificed in response to the last disaster, which had economic effects on top of that.
If we could coordinate a perfect shelter-in-place the outbreak would have been gone by now. If people don't cooperate with each other we will have a much prolonged outbreak.
Or in another perspective think about whether your comment is what you feel like saying or whether it is something that contributes to the discussion.
The US GDP is around 22 trillion a year.
Therefore each million >=60 year olds saved is worth completely shutting down the US economy for around three months.
1) Taking this https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm and combining with SS Life Expectancy tables, the average years lost per death is ~12; that corresponds to the age of 72-73, not 60.
2) Even the most alarmist reports barely predicted million deaths in the worst case scenario.
3) How is lifetime value of 60 year old 5 million? Based on the same SS tables, that's for 21.5 years, so ~230k per year. Where is this number coming from?
3a) Using some objective standard like annual income, it would obviously be far lower.
3b) You can even use a personal take - would you rather have $5 million (translation: very safe ~$150-200k/year for life including childhood, so you never have to work while living an upper middle class lifestyle), and have a risk of death at 60 with a COVID probability for 60-year-old (~4% CFR or so, so lower IFR and even lower combined with non-100% infection rate), or have $0, live with a median job and income, and not have that risk? What about throwing out the "60-year-old" and taking the real average case, 72-73yo (with its increased CFR/IFR)? I'm pretty sure I'd roll that dice for as little as a $200-300k head start.
4) Moreover, disability adjusted life years and other similar metrics often (quite justifiably) weight later years of life lower than the earlier ones. Again, to make this more personal or less numeric, would you rather be paralyzed from neck down in your 30ies (and then remiss) or die at 80 instead of 85? I'd take dying earlier.
If it were even spread out through the year (it is not), a 5% hit in Q2 would be $250 billion in that quarter.
That's true. This is a serious attempt to model, and I did in fact hear about it, now that you remind me.
Money is an abstraction we use to measure (relative) value. Wealth is the sum total of physical goods/services/resources that we rely on.
When you neuter an economy, as we have done in the US, you destroy real wealth. There is no way to counteract that by injecting money. It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged.
It is no surprise then that someone who holds that view would have trouble seeing the real damage that a shutdown like ours does. We have postponed elective surgeries, leading to furloughing tens of thousands of medical workers across the country because in many areas hospitals are practically empty. We’re halting meat packing plants because some portion of employees have tested positive. We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point).
We treated a really bad but manageable papercut by chopping off our hand, and in doing so we have widened inequality in _every dimension_. What does a poor school-aged child who does not own a laptop do with remote schooling? What do millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and are now unemployed do? What about those postponing important preventative care that will prevent future deaths from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes?
How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
We took a bunch of otherwise healthy people, instilled them with disproportionate, all-consuming fear, and have had people in social isolation, which not only produces its own mortality but will also retard the natural exchange of micro-organisms that our health relies upon.
And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it, while destroying the quality of life of the 99.4% of the population who never would have died from this thing anyway (there’s debate as to whether the IFR is .3% or 1% but I think .6% is a very conservative number)
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In answer to your question about models, you are right that we need more of them, and in rereading your comment I see you were more raising questions than advocating a pro-lockdown stance. In any case I encourage you to check out http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=69.... I’m on mobile right now otherwise I’d quote from it but they look at it in terms of wellbeing-years
You kind of can. In a situation like this, you have a lot of people who can't work because they're at home (or have no customers because their customers are at home), which causes two types of economic damage. One, the thing they were making is not being made. Two, they're not getting paid, so they're not buying what they would have bought with the money, and then that isn't getting made and so on down the line.
The second problem is actually bigger (because of "and so on down the line") but can be addressed entirely via fiscal means. Give people money to replace what they're not making.
And it even helps some with the first by increasing general demand. The things that are still open (e.g. because they're work from home) will then see increased business, have to hire more people to fill the demand and provide jobs for the people who can't do their normal jobs so they're still being productive.
Doing that is not going to eliminate the entire cost, but it is going to make it a lot smaller.
> It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged.
Buybacks actually reduce the market cap because there are fewer outstanding shares and the company has fewer total assets (in the amount of the cash used for the buyback which the company no longer has because it is now in the hands of the shareholders who sold their shares).
And doing that does tend to cause the overall economy to grow because it moves cash from a company that apparently had no need for it to investors who are incentivized to find somewhere else to put it to productive use.
This isn't to say that your overall conclusion is necessarily wrong. Even 10% of the cost of shutting down the whole world is large. But if you want to compare the numbers they should be the right numbers.
Count yourself among those who do not understand the difference between money and wealth. What they're "not making" isn't money; what they're not making are goods or services. That's the point you're attempting to respond to, and you've missed the point.
> What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around.
Money is not wealth. You can play whatever games you want with redistributing the money, but without the wealth you have nothing to eat.
Yes, but it was only manageable for so long. We have unfortunately passed that point...
Hopefully we will know more about what this massive mortality spike[1] is about, but I doubt it is from collateral damage rather than covid-19 itself
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...
Yes, without shutdown some people would have taken sick days, etc, but the effect would be extremely manageable. We would not have people dropping like flies the way the flawed IMHE model implies.
As to your question about rushing down the old path, it is very inappropriate for the government to destroy peoples’ livelihoods (and make no mistake, it was the government’s / our doing, _not_ covid), and then to turn around and say “you’re only screwed because government isn’t in your life _enough_!”. As your point revealed, this is actually IMO what democrats are very blatantly trying to do (I am calling out a specific party because it really is them who are still pushing for these lockdowns).
It’s not relevant, but know that I support UBI (iff it replaces welfare rather than being in addition to it), but not like this. This would be such an evil way to introduce UBI: manufacturing a problem and then “fixing” it.
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The inequality exacerbation is not a consequence of our economy. The government created it by creating the concept of “essential workers”. All workers are exactly as essential as the economy (we) decide(s) they are.
But we didn’t just prevent wealth from being created, the media combined with our incompetent public health officials created an unprecedented level of panic and fearmongering that most of us have never seen in our lives. The result? Case studies like this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517812... (and no, this was not caused by covid, it was causes by the aforementioned fearmongering)
Now, the number of sick days will be far higher than the number of hospitalization-days. But if we're comparing losing, say, 25% of our efficiency, to losing 100% of it...yeah, it actually wouldn't be as massive as most people think.
Anyway, a better characterization of my view is that I view containment as an unworkable strategy (and everything we're seeing in the US further proves that, IMO), therefore we didn't actually avoid any true mortality by locking down. Rather we just postponed it.
We never overwhelmed our healthcare system, and due to cancelling elective surgeries and other important preventative care, we have actually scaled _down_ our healthcare capacity by a massive amount across the country. Tens of thousands of healthcare workers furloughed. How is that sane policy?
Umm, no.
Do you think that hospitals are overloaded with COVID-19 patients just so that they could die comfortably there?
The point of shelter-in-place is to prevent overloading of hospitals so that both COVID-19 patients and everyone else could get care - and have their lives saved by medics (which is often possible).
The alternative is the Italy scenario, where the doctors will have plenty treatable COVID-19 cases, but no means to save the lives that can actually be saved.
>How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
> social isolation [...] produces its own mortality
This is scaremongering. If you have any estimates, go ahead, and pit them against what is now the #1 cause of death in many regions across the US.
>We treated a really bad but manageable papercut..
The number of people who died from COVID-19 is about the same as people who died in the Vietnam war at this point.
I don't know how else to convey the point that it's not quite a 'paper cut'.
>We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point).
Yes, because schools is how the flu spreads to parents of these children - and everyone else in that household.
> There is no way to counteract that by injecting money.
There is also no way to bring people back to life. Cry me a river about destruction of wealth.
We achieved that, and yet we're still locked down. Why?
The fears of hospital overruns was based on scary numbers that turned out to not reflect reality at all. The hospitalization rate is far lower than we thought. The infection fatality rate is far lower than was implied by the CFRs being thrown around.
> This is scaremongering. If you have any estimates, go ahead, and pit them against what is now the #1 cause of death in many regions across the US.
No, it's not. But anyway, I predict at least an extra 50,000 suicides (i.e. a 2x risk of suicide). Similarly, we could easily see twice as many opioid overdoses which would be another 60,000. (I feel more confident in the spike in suicide than the spike of overdoses because it may be that the fentanyl supply chain has been disrupted).
> The number of people who died from COVID-19 is about the same as people who died in the Vietnam war at this point.
And also roughly the same as the number of people who died from the Flu last year. And about 1/10 of the estimated 480,000 smoking deaths per year in the US.
But, I'm not saying that Covid is not a big deal. What I'm actually saying is that lockdowns don't reduce mortality whatsoever, rather they increase it, because containment is not a viable strategy and the lockdown harms groups who never would have been harmed by Covid.
I'm predicting well over 100,000 Covid deaths this year.
> There is also no way to bring people back to life. Cry me a river about destruction of wealth.
The lockdown is destroying life, not "just" wealth. And I don't just mean in wellbeing, which we've absolutely destroyed. We're causing actual deaths by foregoing preventative care, furloughing tens of thousands of healthcare workers across the country, and increasing mortality from suicide/overdose/all cause mortality in general.
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Here, go ahead and read https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=22961835&goto=threads%...
Yes, part of the economic damage caused by a lockdown is production lost in businesses that cannot be operated safely at the time. That production cannot be restored with money.
But a big part of the damage is caused by knock-on effects of businesses and individuals reducing consumption as a result of the primary economic shock, and that part absolutely can be mitigated.
> How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
Maybe less of one than one would intuitively think. Ultimately, mortality went down during the great depression: https://jech.bmj.com/content/66/5/410.abstract?sid=5c77edc9-...
> And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it
That very much remains to be seen. I see it as a virtual certainty that in a year, we'll have a much better understanding of the efficacy of various currently existing treatment options. I see it as quite likely that we'll have additional treatment options. And I see it as entirely possible that we'll have a vaccine within the next few years.
And even if not a single death from covid-19 itself in the primary at-risk group is preventable, overwhelming the health care system causes preventable deaths from other causes, as well as preventable deaths and burnouts among exhausted health care professionals.
> In any case I encourage you to check out [See URL above]
You will note that your own source estimates a large benefit of maintaining a lockdown until June 1, and considers maintaining the lockdown until July 1 essentially a wash. That's hardly a ringing endorsement of your views.
I provided the source to show that models are being formed. My own views materially differ from the authors', particularly on that point.
> overwhelming the health care system causes preventable deaths from other causes, as well as preventable deaths and burnouts among exhausted health care professionals.
Well, but what we've actually done is exactly that, in the opposite direction. Rather than our healthcare system being crushed by hordes of covid patients, across the US in places that aren't being ravaged (so, everywhere that isn't new york/new jersey/etc), we are dramatically scaling _down_ our healthcare capacity due to having furloughed tens of thousands of medical workers for the exact reason that people are postponing elective surgeries and other preventative measures that we know reduce mortality.
In other words, you're right about preventable deaths from other causes, but we actually are causing those right now by being locked down.
I suspect it goes to non-lethal costs more, and then its the usual problem of milli-morts against economic cost/benefit.
If 1% is 1 million then 30% is 30 million and 100% is 100 million? I thought we had more people?
But lets assume for sake of argument that we've over reacted. Its pretty fantastic the way all countries in the world [few exceptions aside] took the matter so seriously and managed to take collective action this quickly. Despite all the death and suffering we now have a legitimate reason to be hopeful and imaginative about what else we can do and what it might cost.
The situation is truly weirder than fiction: The Corona lock down might have saved [oh, say] 80 million elderly people (unscientific number). It might in 2020 also push 180 million [additional] incomes below $5.50/day, 150 m below $3.20/day, 60 m below $1.90/day. We can barely imagine the long term effects of that. Safe to say it ain't pretty.