Comment by haltingproblem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haltingproblem | Hacker News Reader

Depends on your base-line. Take Taiwan.

Taiwan was masked up and implemented international quarantine in January along with full contract/tracing. Yes, they have characteristics and infrastructure we cannot perfectly replicate like a homogeneous population with relatively even socio-economic status, social cohesions and a strong societal memory of SARs with infrastructure to go along with it and a complete mistrust of information coming from WHO and China.

But even if we did 80% as well as Taiwan we are talking about almost 100,000 deaths. I think the excess mortality is around 2x what we are seeing in the official death figures so more like 200,000 deaths.

Add in the trillions in the bailout and economic damage, this might be the worst decision ever.

Taleb et.al issued a warning on Jan 26 about this. As he said - governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.” [1]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is...

> Add in the trillions in the bailout and economic damage, this might be the worst decision ever.

This was caused by the pandemic itself, not by the reaction to it. There's no scenario in which a pandemic ravaging unchecked through the populace does not create massive economic damage.

It didn't have to be unchecked. That's the thing. Taiwan never closed down.

We would have needed a better president in the White House at the very minimum to have had a better response. And that's enough of a counterfactual that I'm just taking the current situation as a given. Given the president we do have, the current result seems to have been inevitable one way or another. We could've had fewer deaths here in NYC with a better governor and mayor who acted more quickly, but again, this is a hell of a counterfactual.

States are reopening based on the rate of infection. If there was more testing and better contact tracing earlier, these reopenings would've happened earlier. Which means less money needed to keep the economy from crashing.

Had we reacted better, it's reasonable to believe that we could have contained it properly and not spent as many trillions.

The worse we let the pandemic get, the more expensive it will be.

The countries that took early measures i.e. Taiwan and South Korea have not had anywhere near the economic shutdown we have had. Economic damage and the need for gargantuan bailouts has been greatly curtailed.

We are now perenially in a wave of shutdowns and loosenings as the virus ripples through the population till we have a vaccine or herd immunity or it is reduced to a manageable chronic problem.

Why do you believe the excess mortality is higher than reported?

I known firsthand cases where hospitals were writing "covid related" on death certificates for deaths that had absolutely fuck-all to do with covid (in my case, I had to get the coroner involved to fight the hospital to get it changed).

Thats not to say that a point is a pattern, but my case isn't the only one.

In places with smaller outbreaks, excess deaths aren’t elevated, so whatever factor it is can’t be entirely unrelated to the local prevalence.

Expected deaths per month (averaged over the last 30 years) compared to to actual deaths per month for 2020. We are seeing a lot more death in general, specifically not directly attributed to COVID.

US can’t pull these numbers yet but they are available for many parts of Europe and those countries show way higher “non-COVID” deaths than expected.

On mobile and can’t find the source atm

> US can’t pull these numbers yet

They're available on the CDC website, about 1/3 down the page: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

The data I saw for the Northern Provinces (Lombardy?) showed that they had 3x the normal mortality. 1x of that is the baseline that includes workplace accidents, sports, auto accidents many of which are not happening now. The rest 2x can be reasonably attributed to Covid. But only half of the 2x (1x) was being attributed to Covid. There was similar data from rest of Europe. I believe the FT had a very good piece on it [?].

I am not factoring in reduced life expectancy of the Covid recovery cohort. Someone who recovers from Covid after a few weeks/months on a ventilator will have residual effects which will lower expectancy for that cohort. They are now finding long term lung damage among Covid recoveries.

Please, please wear a mask especially in indoor spaces and take precautions till we have a vaccine.

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