I've been meaning to ask in /r/theydidthemath if the quarantine is actually reducing violent crime, car accidents, pollution, other infectious diseases, STDs, etc. so that we may come out break even or even ahead compared to covid deaths. Just trying to find the silver lining here.
non-essential procedures and doctor's visits have also been cancelled, and some medicines are now rationed also. Both will have a negative impact on the health of some people.
I personally had a month long series of treatments scheduled that got cancelled, and now I have no idea when I'll be able to get that treatment. Better than dying from the virus, though.
I've had a scan that was scheduled five months ago cancelled, and one of my vitally necessary meds was three weeks late getting filled. Good thing I'm worried about running out so had some to spare, but it's no joke that people are going to die due to simply not getting what they need.
My wife had a similar experience. Her issue is probably not major, but it could also be a serious cancer and who knows when they'll start taking clients again, much less catch up to her.
Making a rough guess of two months of shutdown, we've lost 1/6 of our annual non-emergency medical capacity for 2020. It'd be impossible to put a number on the cost in lives that means, but I think we can probably say with certainty that there are a non-insignificant number of people who will die or experience permanent medical issues because diagnosis and/or treatment was delayed.
Perhaps I've missed it, but I'm honestly shocked this isn't priority number one for a partial reopening in regions with low infection rates.
A lot of these "elective" "nonessential" services are really preventative.
This was plainly brought into view for me with a dental procedure I had to cancel/reschedule. It's deemed non-essential, but is necessary to prevent me from losing an entire tooth or two. If it's not done reasonably soon it's only a matter of time before it turns into an emergency dental procedure.
Really? Maybe my local experience is an outlier but I've seen significantly more people cooking meals at home and exercising. The number of daily runners in my neighborhood has easily increased 10x. Are gluttony and sedentary lifestyles not the major contributors for type-2 diabetes and heart disease?
I've had a similar experience, though I have no idea if the runners I'm seeing makes up for less activity throughout the day, gyms being closed, etc. It's possible that the 4% of people who go to the gym regularly are now running outside, and everyone else is even less active.
Also, heart disease and type-2 diabetes are years in the making, and a month of moderate exercise and better eating won't make up for it overnight. Not to mention added stress.
No, there is not. When the circumstances change, habits change too.
When people go back to work, they will have less time at their hands. They will have to adjust to commuting again, taking kids to/from school again, being somewhere at time again.
All of that will cut into their exercise time. All the people who are exercising out of boredom now will stop exercising out of being tired of doing lot of things again.
> The number of daily runners in my neighborhood has easily increased 10x.
Those are probably largely people that probably did just as much activity somewhere other than their home neighborhood (physical-but-nonessential labor, gym, athletic hobbies that rely on now-closed businesses, etc.)
I went running the other day for the first time in over a year, just as a way of getting fresh air. And before that I'd already lost 8 pounds since quarantine started, just because I haven't been eating restaurant-portions.
This is bad analysis which uses historic numbers and plops COVID against them. Everyone right now is dying of COVID and not much else. Apparently it’s healing cancer and heart attacks.
If they're making the same claim I've seen elsewhere: People who would have died anyway from cancer/heart attacks but also have COVID19 are getting counted as COVID19 deaths instead of other causes, causing a dip in those numbers.
Aside from even the fatalities, the math still is that 50% of LA is presently unemployed. While some articles are somehow gleeful in the face of this calamitous reality, there is no where near a net balance.
The Fed has spent at least $2 trillion dollars on this already. Probably closer to $6 trillion by the time we are done. It is an unimaginably large cost to shut things down relative to any possible benefit.
I think you’re missing the point. It’s hard to tell when preventative actions work. It’s easy to tell when they fail. Right now the evidence is things would be a lot worse without them.
For 6T I feel like we could prevent the half a million malaria deaths that happen each and every year since forever and have money left over to tackle the 100k obesity deaths each yeah in the US.
I’m not saying our response is wrong by the way. But it’s a jaw dropping number. It’s a building a moon base, or universal healthcare for a decade, or a mission to mars, or high speed trains up and down America’s coasts number.
I mean yes, of course it is. But does it do anything to stare and point at it with your jaw dropped? What does the alternate timeline look like where the government had no need to distribute significant amounts of money to employees and businesses?
Early antibody studies have shown that prevalence is much, much higher than positive case count would indicate.
Potentially 50x - 85x more cases than positive tests based on the Santa Clara / Stanford study.
In Boston last week they mass tested at the Pine St homeless shelter and found 50% of them positive and 100% of those were asymptomatic.
If when the dust settles the reality is that the curve wasn’t flattened at all, most everyone was already exposed, and the true IFR was more like 0.25%.... then we flushed $6 trillion down the toilet.
> If when the dust settles the reality is that the curve wasn’t flattened at all, most everyone was already exposed, and the true IFR was more like 0.25%.... then we flushed $6 trillion down the toilet.
Isn't that like going all in with two aces in texas hold'em poker, and saying "If when the dust settles the reality is that the other guy had a 7 and a 2, and the board was a 3, 4, 5, 6 and a J, then I flushed all my stack down the toilet"? You make the decisions based on the information you have at the time. If you're forced to make a probabilistic call based on what you know then, your decision doesn't become wrong based on the future outcome.
And if you look at New York City for example, can you imagine any scenario where when the dust settles it turns out that we didn't have to do any of that social distancing and stimulus injecting?
Are you making the case that one of the possibilities in this forest of unknowns is that maybe we didn't have to do anything? How does that match up with what we're seeing happening in say, NYC?
Those 6T haven't been spent, right? Those are funds committed towards "stimulus programs" (whatever that means in the end) that will run over months or years. It's still a staggering number, staggering also in comparison to other world economies. That is probably the intended effect.
Your calculus is off. The $2T spent (not $6T) is not for the 40k deaths, but for preventing 400K additional deaths. At $5K per saved life, well worth it. If you want to fault the spending, talk to Congress and the WH about why it's so misallocated.
I wonder if we'll see a big drop in flu deaths as overwhelmingly only the old and sick die of COVID, and those folks are at large risk from the flu also.
The flu season overlapped with a period that included initial reports and fear of a novel respiratory disease and then historic, mandatory countermeasures (for the vast majority of the population) against communicable respiratory disease; it would be bizarre if there wasn't a big drop in flu deaths.
I meant in following years, as those who likely would have succumbed to the flu in following years succumb to COVID now. For the current period, there's absolutely no way flu, car and so on deaths don't plunge.
Even in vulnerable groups, the case fatality rate doesn't seem high enough that it would make a big impact in future statistics for that reason (probably bigger impact through lasting behavioral changes.)
About 35k people die from car crashes in the U.S. each year (or at least they did). That has always served as my personal benchmark for risks: if I'm more likely to die in a car crash, I don't worry about it.
Funny you should mention that. You have approximately a 1% lifetime risk of dying from a car crash in the US [1], and your risk of dying from a COVID infection is 0.37% per the latest study from Germany (and it overwhelmingly only kills the old and sick). Given you develop immunity after (no evidence you don't yet), that represents a lifetime risk too. Which means, your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident remains about 3X higher than from dying of a COVID infection.
Lifetime risk is a better way of comparing the two because (a) both of them represent lifetime risks and (b) COVID is front-loaded, spreading furiously through the population so your daily risk today is higher than your daily risk of a dying in a car crash, but your lifetime risk remains much lower.
It's also worth calling out the flu has killed 2X as many people as COVID has to date this flu season. A bad flu season in the US kills about 60K people each year.
> your risk of dying from a COVID infection is 0.37%
I'm 55 so I'm pretty sure my risk is higher than that. Also, the covid risk is highly front-loaded. If I'm gong to die from covid, I'm likely to do so now whereas if I'm going to die in a car crash that might happen now or it might happen later. I don't really care about dying per se. Sooner or later it's going to happen. What I care about is dying sooner and more painfully than I have to. Drowning on my own bodily fluids doesn't sound like a pleasant way to go.
Not really actually! In your age category 50-59 your case fatality rate is 1.3% [1] and given the way it affects the older end of the band more significantly than yourself in the middle of the band, it wouldn't be at all unlikely that your case fatality rate is right around 1%.
Further, we have been seeing anywhere from 30-80% of cases are asymptomatic or result in mild flulike symptoms and therefore not accounted for in case fatality rates. Indeed the Gangelt study put the overall infection fatality rate at 0.37% when Germany's case fatality rate is around 2%. It wouldn't surprise me at all if your risk was about 7X lower than the stated 1.3%, as low as 0.25%
I also wouldn't be so quick to assume car crashes are a pleasant way to go.
Your risk of dying is, accepting the 0.37% for the sake of argument, 0.37% if you're infected. The actual chance of anyone, even of someone in a more dangerous demographic, of dying of Covid in their lifetime is significantly lower than that.
Additionally, I believe the 1% chance of dying in a car crash is over the course of a lifetime. A 55 year old has likely lived well over half their life and has also aged past a significant chunk of the riskiest time to be in a car (likely 16-30).
> Your risk of dying is, accepting the 0.37% for the sake of argument, 0.37% if you're infected. The actual chance of anyone, even of someone in a more dangerous demographic, of dying of Covid in their lifetime is significantly lower than that.
I personally believe that given the R0 and the large number of asymptomatic cases, there's no putting this genie back in the bag, and I agree with prominent epidemiologists that we're all going to get it one way or the other -- because nobody's going to stay inside the 18 months it'll take to develop a widespread vaccine. That's why I support Sweden's model. [1] So I just rounded up to 100% and projected out.
> Additionally, I believe the 1% chance of dying in a car crash is over the course of a lifetime. A 55 year old has likely lived well over half their life and has also aged past a significant chunk of the riskiest time to be in a car (likely 16-30).
Good point! I wonder if it's a bimodal distribution. I assume older folks can't get out of the way fast enough as pedestrians and are more likely to get into accidents when driving.
You support Sweden's model of ignoring the issue? Not only do they still have a high exponential growth rate, as well as exponentially increasing death counts, but their CFR is atrocious. Also the link in your footnote is extremely outdated, and doesn't mention anything about Sweden.
Sweden has actually leveled off and had flat new case growth over the last week [1], same as in Canada where they have shut the world down (in terms of flatness not numbers). Further CFR is almost exclusively based on age of acquisition and the extent to which hospitals are available. In Sweden hospitals are available. The disease is exactly the same everywhere so it’s much more to do with demographics.
I mean they’ve had 15000 recorded cases (of course since they’re letting the disease roam free without a general population testing regimen that’s going to be a minuscule fraction of the denominator which they expect to reach 7 million ish) and 1500 deaths. Crude CFR is 10%.
Bloomberg and the government as of 10 hours ago claim their strategy of “ignoring” a disease that’s just not that fatal is working great, and that unlike the rest of the world they’ll never have to deal with it again as they’re en route to developing herd immunity. [2]
IMO it’s becoming more and more clear that we collectively lost our minds in panic over something that’s just not that bad. The Swedish model is one to replicate.
Do you even check your numbers? Sweden has over 1500 deaths to date.
Your just cherry picking numbers and extrapolating to fit your conclusions. Their CFR is 10% now. 10%. That's extraordinary. You can't dismiss their current stats and then say they don't have a genpop testing regimen as a means of supporting your claims.
And even if you get "lucky" with a crude CFR of 1%, that's disastrous. If just 50% become infected, that's 50K deaths, not 500. And another 250-500K hospitalizations with long lasting effects.
(1) The books you claimed I was cooking were typos (notice they were off by one character each?). I've updated the post to reflect what I intended, so thanks for calling that out.
(2) Let's use our noodle for a sec greedo.
They haven't been attempting to control the spread of COVID, and you're telling me they only have 15,000 cases out of a population of 10,000,000 when the R0 is between 2 and 3? Do you genuinely believe that it's not a lack of proper testing? When Gangelt had a seropositive rate of 15% and Santa Clara has 2-5% previously infected?
That would make the denominator not 15,000 but 200,000-1,500,000 or 0.75% to 0.1% which is again in line with IFR estimates we've been seeing lately. Worse than the flu, certainly, but not devastating.
Frankly, that's probably a conservative denominator.
Second as I explained in a peer post, trying to establish the infection fatality rate of the disease based on its case fatality rate is like trying to figure out how risky skydiving is by setting your denominator at "whoever shows up in hospital with skydiving injuries" and the numerator at "whoever survives" -- it's peak adverse selection bias. Can you imagine the government of Sweden telling the population that 1 in 10 of them will die and them being okay with this plan? haha.
Studies are pinning the infection fatality rate at between 0.25% and 1%, and more often than not in the lower quartile of that band -- and almost all of those deaths are the old and sick who should be isolated and protected.
Further, because so many people don't have symptoms and it's so contagious, and the vaccine is at least 12-18 months away, we are all going to get it. Well 70% of us anyways. Sweden is front-loading this burden. Basically none of the numbers are directly comparable, as the minute the US re-opens it'll be playing whack-a-mole with city/state level shutdowns as China is.
I actually dedicated much of my comment to addressing that, specifically pointing out that COVID represents a lifetime risk that's been front-loaded and so it's fair to compare COVID's infection fatality rate to your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident. I also called out explicitly that COVID has been front-loaded.
Also, it's not a fair comparison between the flu and COVID because the flu has that unfortunate feature known as horizontal gene transfer. That's why you can get re-infected by the flu each year, and why in spite of a massive vaccination campaign the flu causes 45,000,000 illnesses each year in the US alone (and 60,000 deaths) -- and 650,000 deaths worldwide.
Each year. And each upcoming year. COVID will, based on what we know so far, happen once.
You also have to take into account the uncertainty in your risk evaluation. The fatality rate is largely unknown so it's a bit deceptive to quote numbers like 0.37% as if it could be measure up to the second decimal. The German study probably came with error bars that were larger than that. For the age group 50-59, maybe it's 1.3% according to NY state (for both males and females so if the person you responds to is male, it's higher), but it could very well be 2% (or 0.5%) without it being surprising.
There is also a big assumption in considering the risk to be front-loaded. This is not the flu, but it could very well come back next year or in ten years in a different form. We just don't know yet this virus with enough confidence to do this assumption. Anyway, it is a bit strange that the ability for this virus to mutate next year would impact the risk of dying by going out tomorrow which, I think, the person your responded to was thinking about.
Finally, you're saying the flu deaths this year is double what the coronavirus has done, but again the uncertainty is high: the CDC estimation for the flu is from 24,000 to 62,000 deaths this season [1]. So it could be the double, but it could be actually lower. Let's not do things like chosing the estimate that better suits the argument without saying it's a high end of the estimate.
> This is not the flu, but it could very well come back next year or in ten years in a different form.
There has been no evidence of substantial mutations so far in COVID. There's no evidence that COVID will come back in a new and different form, any more than there's evidence I'll come back next week as a velociraptor. I mean, it could happen, but it's not something I'll plan for until I start sprouting scales and and a giant tail. Mutations are pretty random and the vast majority of mutations are harmful to the virus.
It's worth considering we live with coronaviridae all the time, something like 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronaviridae. [2] There's as much evidence of the common cold becoming Ebola as there is of me becoming a velociraptor.
The flu death range is likely more to do with how good a job we do guessing which the predominant strain will be in a given year, as the flu vaccine efficacy rate ranges from 10% to 60% each year. [1]
Is the german study of germany? Because the ratio of recoveries to deaths is way higher in germany than the united states. The risk of covid varries a lot by geographic region and usa seems like one of the worst.
> It's also worth calling out the flu has killed 2X as many people as COVID has to date this flu season. A bad flu season in the US kills about 60K people each year.
So far. The flu season started before the covid season so that's a bit of an apples and oranges as you are comparing different time scales. The bigger issue though is its unknown how big covid could get if it balloons. Like its mostly on par with flu now, but its not over yet and that's with the taking of extreme messures to prevent transmission (which we dont do to prevent flu). Measuring potential risk in terms of what's happened so far when we haven't even seen what a complete season of covid look like, feels premature. Jumping off a bridge also looks safe if you base your predictions on the lack of all the bad things that happened before you hit the ground.
> Because the ratio of recoveries to deaths is way higher in germany than the united states. The risk of covid varries a lot by geographic region and usa seems like one of the worst.
You'd need to be a lot more specific. Which state are you referring to? Most US states are safer on Covid mortality than Germany. California + Texas + Florida (the three largest by population) combined have the same population as Germany with half the per capita death rate.
It would be like combining Italy, Spain and Greece and pretending they're all seeing the same situation.
Germany has a per 100k mortality rate of 5 for Covid.
Texas has a per 100k mortality rate of 1.5. California is 2.7. Florida is 3.6.
Germany has 89m people with 4,538 deaths. Texas has 29m people with a mere 453 deaths.
California + Texas + Florida = 89m people, with 2,290 deaths.
More large states? Ohio is 3.9. Virginia is 3. Arizona is 2.4. North Carolina is 1.5.
So as you can see, most of the US in fact doesn't look like New York, New Jersey, Michigan. Just like most of Europe doesn't look like Spain.
More countries in Europe for comparison (per 100k rate):
Belgium 47, Spain 44, Italy 38, France 29, Britain 23, Netherlands 21, Switzerland 16, Sweden 15, Ireland 11.6, Portugal 6.7, Denmark 6, Austria 5, Norway 3, Finland 1.6.
The three largest US states combined have a rate of 2.5.
Seems to me that according our current knowledge, all those numbers will end up at roughly the same number as time goes on. (Assuming you're counting the same thing.)
Lower, if your population is young and healthy. Much lower, if you miraculously stop community spread until medication is available.
Higher, if the disease spreads too fast and hospitals are overloaded, or if your population is old or unhealthy.
A 1% chance of death that’s evenly distributed across 80 years is dramatically less impactful to one’s expected quantity of life than a 1% chance of death that happens immediately.
Additionally, I’d note that nearly all higher income individuals take steps to reduce their auto death risks including buying safer vehicles, living closer to work, and using professional drivers when drunk or otherwise impaired.
As for your final paragraph, it is wholly unreasonable to imply that covid (which is killing thousands of Americans per day despite a massive distancing effort) is less serious than the flu (which has persisted over a much longer period of time and which was not subject to special responses).
> As for your final paragraph, it is wholly unreasonable to imply that covid (which is killing thousands of Americans per day despite a massive distancing effort) is less serious than the flu (which has persisted over a much longer period of time and which was not subject to special responses).
I didn't say or imply that. It's worse than the flu, probably 5-10X worse. Not bad, not great.
I'm suggesting that people are freaking out because there's "bodies on the street" and we're all in serious danger (we're overwhelmingly just not) when the death toll to date is about half of what we paid zero attention to whatsoever over the same time period.
My argument is that we shouldn't be nearly as freaked out about COVID as we are, and we should be more freaked out about the flu.
There's reason to take precautions, especially if you're in a risk category, but not at all to the extent of the panic we've seen to date.
In fact Sweden's plan of literally just that is going great, they've not shut anything down, and told people to stay home if they're sick (shocking, I know) and the serious-case infection growth rate has flattened out by itself. [1, 2]
You are not taking at all into account the likelihood of suffering permanent life-long damage to lungs, hearth, kidneys and brain[0] which makes you predisposed to develop other painful (and sometimes fatal) conditions.
Also there is not enough evidence to believe COVID happens only once per person[1]
South Korea, the country with the best testing so far has reported 116 people re-infected[2], so there IS evidence about it happening.
> Also there is not enough evidence to believe COVID happens only once per person.
There's also no evidence it doesn't. What we do know is that the disease hasn't mutated significantly to date, and we see strong antibody response. [1] In time, we'll have a vaccine and it may require a number of booster shots, but what we know so far suggest reason for optimism, not pessimism.
That death rate is skewed. A COVID death is counted if the person had the infection and died, even if a co-morbidity would have killed them anyway. A person that has no symptoms or mild symptoms isn’t necessary known to have had the disease, which means there is a significantly lower death rate because the known infections is what’s used for the death rate, not the actual number of infections. A newly released study showed that 4% of Santa Clara County had exposure, but the “confirmed cases” is vastly lower than that. A 5% mortality rate is just false. Confirmed infections can’t be used to determine mortality because the number of actual infections is obviously going to be much higher. Mild or asymptomatic people aren’t going to the hospital to be tested so they aren’t being included in mortality calculations.
That doesn't matter much when there is no strong evidence that to have had COVID guarantees immunity[0] because being asymptomatic now doesn't mean they will be asymptomatic in the future, just South Korea has reported 116 people re-infected[0]
It's much more likely those in Korea received false negative test results earlier on. Let's say that was the case, though, 116 out of 2.5 million rounds to zero and is of no practical consequence to herd immunity or the potential effectiveness of a vaccine. All we need for either is 60-70% of people ending up with immunity -- so far your number is 0.0046%
Re 1: Hardest hit would be the most helpful place to study. And I look forward to continued updates. The Stanford study, while there's certainly questions, has numbers in line with the Gangelt study. [1]
Re 2: Because much of the audience here is American, and there's not a similar study of the US population.
Re 3: No, the COVID-19 mortality rate is not 5.3%. The case fatality rate is 5.3%. Those are not the same, for an obvious reason -- currently the overwhelming majority of tests are carried out on people who go to hospital because they're sick. It's adverse selection bias.
For instance, it'd be like trying to measure the fatality rate of skydiving by measuring the odds that someone who ends up in the hospital with a skydiving injury dies. You'd think it's 99% fatal, but of course, it's not.
All you know is the numerator, not the denominator.
> It's also worth calling out the flu has killed 2X as many people as COVID has to date this flu season.
No, it hasn't.
> A bad flu season in the US kills about 60K people each year.
You're not counting covid-19 deaths and flu deaths using the same methods so you can't compare yet. The method you're using for flu is inclusive and will tend to overcount. The method you're using for covid-19 deaths excludes some deaths and we know it's undercounting covid-19 deaths.
When we get the figures for care home and nursing home deaths included we'll see large increases in covid-19 deaths.
Yes, it has. Citation needed, because I provided data and you didn't.
> You're not counting covid-19 deaths and flu deaths using the same methods so you can't compare yet. The method you're using for flu is inclusive and will tend to overcount. The method you're using for covid-19 deaths excludes some deaths and we know it's undercounting covid-19 deaths.
[citation needed]
> When we get the figures for care home and nursing home deaths included we'll see large increases in covid-19 deaths.
That's a totally dishonest way of approaching this when we know for a fact people under 50 have basically no risk from COVID and that folks who are over 70 have easily two orders of magnitude higher risk. In Italy, 99.2% of people who died were age 80.5 and had an average of 3 underlying diseases.
Age 30-39 they had 5 deaths, under 30, 0 deaths at the time this article was written [1] as compared to 852 deaths aged 80-89.
You and I both know the young aren't affected meaningfully, and for them, they won't go to the hospital with a mild cough or with no symptoms at all and so aren't counted in the denominator. You're advocating growing the numerator without growing the denominator to make your case seem stronger than it is.
I don't think it's crazy to compare a "bad COVID year" to a "bad flu year" do you? Our response to a bad flu year is exactly the same as our response to a good flu year. Most people don't really know there is such a thing.
Indeed but that's not evidence of re-infection. That's evidence that re-infection should be thoroughly investigated. Rather, it's evidence of smoke not evidence of fire.
Look at the unemployment rate. What else validation do you need? You can't just ask people to stay locked in their homes and assume everything would be ok.
Should at least be cushioned a bit by the absence of traffic noise and pollution related stress.
Would be nice to have the benefits of both: very little motorized traffic AND no viral threat. We have no control over the latter, but we most certainly have some control over the former.
Domestic violence and child abuse is up. And suicides are increasing. And millions have lost their jobs. Pretty sure unemployed people or those that had their businesses destroyed aren’t basking in the lower noise and pollution reductions.
Those are unfortunately baked into our accounting, much like “killed by bandits” was accounted for in medieval trade until states started being able and willing to provide meaningful security.
But the assumptions in many of them were made a long time ago and don't necessarily apply anymore. In the case of air pollution for example, there probably exists a price that could be paid to significantly reduce it and improve the overall health of everyone.
I don’t disagree. But we seem to be bad at re-evaluating old decisions (definitely in my case), and it doesn’t help when politics is basically a team sport in the US.
The issue is that the price is paid by a set of people who are different from the people who benefit from this.
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.
The right organizes groups to show displays of power
The general public can too. Lookit teacher strikes and SOPA
Especially right now with bungling dumbass, people already stuck home, with supplies...
WFH workers should absolutely be striking
SOPA style web blackout, except for supplies services
Or be a fatalist and let old people’s demands to keep their figurative life afloat drive the species off the cliff
Congress would absolutely have to step in as Trump would finally just crumple into his chair and drool
Which is how it was supposed to be in the US. Public pressures Congress into compliance, not each other through government rules about HR and accounting
Humans are biologically programmed to avoid things that make them fearful
Sitting on your butt riding along isn’t stoking much fear in privileged turds
That we have no power at scale is a lack of imagination and to be completely frank, rather pathetic
Web chuds used SOPA to stop their pet issue but can’t be bothered to shut the screen off for the species itself?
I didn't know that "killed by bandits" was a standard in medieval trade logs! Is there a book or article you could happen to recommend to learn more about that?
I was not being literal, though I’m fairly sure I’m right for some not-too-loose definition of the term.
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:
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. :-)
> The more interesting question is: Will we come ahead in lives saved without the covid measurements.
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.
At least in some European countries where COVID cases has submerged the healthcare system, it is a very bad time to have a stroke or a car accident since the ER rooms are full and a lot of hospital resources are diverted to fight the pandemic. So it increases the mortality of these other situations.
Not sure how this is a contradiction to what the previous poster said. There is a huge variation across Europe and across regions of each country. There are regions where the medical system is completely overloaded. Northern Italy, central Spain and France. It plays a huge role, what phase of the pandemic a country is in. The peak of hospital load is clearly yet to come in the UK. Also, as the vlogger says, people are coming less to the hospitals with non-covid diseases, partially because the local docters are loaded.
It’s interesting also to note that even hospitals are going bankrupt during all of this, as the vast majority of the money is made on “elective” procedures.
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.
I live around 10 blocks from Brooklyn Hospital Center and I assure you the entire hospital, including atriums, waiting rooms, hallways and even meeting rooms are packed with patient beds.
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.
Given enough time, an unchecked virus with the attributes of this Coronavirus will saturate through semi-rural and even rural populations. It’s it might take more time, but that’s usually coupled with more spread out medical services.
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.
New York is starting randomly sampled antibody testing this week.
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.
Domestic violence was up 20% in my country in first weeks of quarantine. Police and social services were super worried it will get worse as quarantine takes longer.
I can google you some local media articles if you want to double-check via google translate.
It makes sense though. People spend more time together in close quarters. People lost jobs. Lots of stress all around. Perfect storm for beating that bastard you meet in the kitchen.
Let’s be honest. Most of the people on this site work from home (no financial worry) and are unmarried or probably no kids. They wouldn’t have any idea about the real cost of this quarantine to the 22 million unemployed Americans (and growing) who’s families were hurting even before this forced, indefinite unemployment.
There must be some sort of "flushing the pipeline" effect involved, provided that the virus kills the vulnerable to some extent. So I wonder how that will affect the numbers in the near future.
My guess is it will slip to slightly below the norm after the pandemic has passed. There are still a lot of people dying that had many years of life ahead of them.
of course everyone has to die at a certain point, when does make a difference and COVID is making a HUGE difference as you can see by the spike in mortality rate
Violent crime should increase. Most violent crime is domestic abuse. Now all of America's abusive parents are out of work, stuck at home with their kids who are also stuck at home. So I think the pandemic will lead to more violent crimes in the household, at least. Dunno how other parts or life will be affected.
I think it depends on the country, here in New Zealand we locked down early, and hard - we've only had 12 deaths - but the reduction in the road toll in the same time is roughly 20-30 so yes we're technically ahead on the deal.
Generally though, covid deaths go up exponentially while road tolls likely don't go down the same way, our trade off is probably only likely if you get in early.
In other news we're likely taking the first step of getting out of out ~1 month lock down later this coming week - our idea of getting out has been described as "lockdown with KFC", roughly equivalent to California's
If we look at the per-capita deaths, many affected countries seem to be moving towards surpassing the leading cause of death in the US, heart desease. At that magnitude, seems unlikely we are saving net lives.
Articles can't be all things. It's a very valid article about a very certain topic, and gives a fascinating insight into how enormous the machine of our "regular" world is.
I personally find it fascinating that for (almost) the first time in living memory we get to have a good long look at what happens when that machine stops. I hope we learn a lot from it.
Only people who lived through rationing in WWII have witnessed a disruption of this size.
The scope that you seem to be expecting isn't possible right now. Anything that's attempting to account for every amount of money lost or saved will end up missing something. The title contains itself to the scope that it is accurate at.
Trusting the reader to intuitively know California is losing massive amounts of money from other things seems reasonable. Just because a title isn't written for the most uneducated reader does not mean it is misleading.
Nothing could be more opposite in the world we live in. This title is indeed a puff piece, intended on showing a "bright" side to the shut down. Its incumbent on the educated reader to see that. Unfortunately, it seems not many people critically think anymore.
Edit: Just because its data, doesn't mean its important. I can't wait to see Cal DOT's surplus after this.
Yep. A silver lining is unambiguously defining a small upside to the larger downside.
For instance, my niece’s pediatrician apparently has not seen or got calls for any severe cases of flu due to social distancing despite still seeing relatively similar amounts of patients
When you say something “saves money” do you think it’s reasonable to require such a statement attest that there is a net savings?
If I go on vacation and set my Nest to eco mode, am I saving money? Sure, certainly I may be saving $5 a day in home utilities cost on my $300/day vacation. But that is not to say that said vacation is actually saving me money.
It would be accurate to say that vacation may be costing me $295 net instead of $300 face value. But just reporting the savings would be misleading.
I don't think this comment deserves to be downvoted. It seems sensible. Sure, it's mostly sensitive to the phrasing, but careful phrasing matters in matters of finance and politics.
Why would losing 500% of California's 2019 GDP be impossible? It's difficult to imagine, sure, but that's just 5x $2.7T.
The sheer number of n'th order effects of this crisis might just mean that most of the economic pain is in the long, fat tail spanning decades into the future.
Amortize that cost as irreversible economic damage and it might be implausible, sure, but not inconceivable.
I doubt we are even near 500%, but I'll go ahead and say I think it's possible in the short term for California to be lose 500% of it's GDP. It's possible to borrow against our future, both literally with money, and figuratively by decreasing future productivity.
For instance, we're (probably) negatively impacting kids education, that's going to have a negative impact on the economy for the next 50+ years. If we fuck up the food supply chains too badly (e.g. migrant works, locusts in africa [1], etc) more kids will suffer from malnutrition, which has a long term effect. Increased poverty rates from the shutdown will likely increase crime rates (and have many other ill effects), which will have a long term effect. Putting the economy into a recession will no doubt significantly slow down all sorts of R&D work delaying useful (and even life saving) inventions. And so and and so forth.
I was going from $1 per day per resident. And in retrospect, I was off re income. $100-$1000 per day is reasonable for a middle class worker, but not the average resident.
Interesting to think about what that $1/resident/day in savings could be spent on, though. A small supply of free masks so everyone can protect each other by wearing one when they go out? Discounted public transit rides to work?
It would sound a lot more impressive if you also count lives saved (yeah yeah I know covid-19 is killing a lot more, just measuring only the silver lining here)
As an American, I hope so, but it is also pretty deeply ingrained. Cities and towns have also already been built spread out and many homes are completely dependent on getting in a car as a necessary first action. Around cities, many are also priced out of where they work with transit not up to the task.
But perhaps those who are able to WFH are getting a glimpse of what it can be like.
Trying to undo your downvote brigade. People don’t want to hear it, but it’s the truth. Density without serious mitigation efforts results in massive spread, see New York.
If we consider the pandemic an exceptional event... Why should we optimize for exceptional events and ignore the cost on a normal day? We should destroy our own health and the health of our planet so that you can feel good about not catching once-in-a-century infectious disease?
Density has many upsides. Economists have shown that denser cities are correlated with productivity gains at a rate surpassing the density increases.
The lack of it has many costs, and not just the economic ones or less efficient use of resources. Increased motor vehicles on a personal scale leads to obesity, stress.
On a global scale, it is harmful to the planet. Note the news reports of clearer skies from a very cease in this activity.
Many European cities actually have very wide streets—they just choose to cede space for bikes, trams, buses, and wider sidewalks, instead of dedicating 100% of the streets to single-occupancy cars and car storage like we do.
The difference in density and sprawl between pre-car and post-car cities is staggering, and is not about the width of streets. You can't get around Los Angeles without driving on freeways.
With investment in public transit (i.e. approximately rebuilding the original streetcar network and building out the existing Metro system) and a high-quality protected bike lane network, LA could be truly amazing.
For one, this situation has nothing to do with cars, so there's no obvious lesson about cars to be drawn from it. Accidents are relatively rare, and when you frame the headline, as another commenter did, as $1 per person-day, it's a lot less impressive.
It's also not viable in a lot of places. Mass transit and living close to work, shopping, and services, is only viable in certain urban centers. NYC, DC, Boston, maybe Chicago are good. LA, not so much (but improving), Dallas, hah! And if you live in a suburb our outside the city? Car.
What will change is habits around traveling. Maybe there will be more working from home (or maybe not). Maybe cities aren't as desirable (or they still are). Maybe there's a broader economic reshuffle. Oil is incredibly cheap right now. Those are the factors that will drive car use over the next few years, not a dollar figure that is, not surprisingly, on the order of what I pay for car insurance. If a $1000 annual insurance bill doesn't keep people out of their cars, why would this headline?
We don't know how many people covid19 would kill if everyone were infected. Given the data we have now about covid19, cars probably killed more people in the last 15 years than covid19 will kill people in the next 15 years.
Other than the obvious drop in drivers due to unemployment, I don't see a plausible way that happens.
Taking public transit is probably one of the riskiest activities the average person might undertake in their day as far as contracting a virus. Whether or not that will cause people to take their cars instead is unknown, but I can't imagine it will increase ridership in the near term.
Additionally we may see a slowing down or even slight reversal in the trends of populations becoming more urban and more dense. Living in a 400sqft apartment is doable for some people when they're spending most of their free time at bars, parks, restaurants, etc., but after enduring months of those places inaccessible the idea of living in a less-dense suburb may be appealing to people.
This seems like a low effort illogical argument to push an anti car agenda? Obviously the economic benefit of cars is far greater than $40M a day for CA. Everything we do involves risk, whether it is driving or flying or simply leaving the house. With risk comes the chance of injury and death. We still decide to go about our lives because there is immense benefit in that. So I don’t see why this is a problem.
Does anyone else wonder from where did they cite the costs in Table 1? I can imagine the reduction in accidents and fatalities and believe their reported numbers with the "significant" p-values but there is no information on how did they arrive at the reported costs. You had one job!
As a back of the envelope for that "$40 Million Per Day" we used to spend, we would have gotten something of greater value. Probably far far greater value.
So we are also losing over "$40 Million Per Day" through lost traffic.
There is no silver lining, it's just giving us a minimum of the value of traffic.
In Los Angeles, there may be fewer car accidents but I’m afraid the ones that do occur will be more fatal. The lack of traffic is allowing people to drive at unsafe speeds. While there is dramatically less traffic, there are still a lot of cars on the freeway. The few times I’ve driven on the freeway, there have been many high speed impatient drivers weaving unsafely between the many remaining cars.
Don't recall the details, but I think this was for a few specific kinds of procedures (cardiac-related?).
There certainly is a problem with iatrogenic deaths (those caused by medical attention itself), but it would be quite a bit too far to say that surgery is on balance harmful taken as a whole.
(And indeed, the point of my remark was that a falling traffic fatality rate isn't necessarily a good thing, once one looks at the entire picture.)
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] thread[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/16/coronaviru...
I personally had a month long series of treatments scheduled that got cancelled, and now I have no idea when I'll be able to get that treatment. Better than dying from the virus, though.
Making a rough guess of two months of shutdown, we've lost 1/6 of our annual non-emergency medical capacity for 2020. It'd be impossible to put a number on the cost in lives that means, but I think we can probably say with certainty that there are a non-insignificant number of people who will die or experience permanent medical issues because diagnosis and/or treatment was delayed.
Perhaps I've missed it, but I'm honestly shocked this isn't priority number one for a partial reopening in regions with low infection rates.
This was plainly brought into view for me with a dental procedure I had to cancel/reschedule. It's deemed non-essential, but is necessary to prevent me from losing an entire tooth or two. If it's not done reasonably soon it's only a matter of time before it turns into an emergency dental procedure.
Also, heart disease and type-2 diabetes are years in the making, and a month of moderate exercise and better eating won't make up for it overnight. Not to mention added stress.
When people go back to work, they will have less time at their hands. They will have to adjust to commuting again, taking kids to/from school again, being somewhere at time again.
All of that will cut into their exercise time. All the people who are exercising out of boredom now will stop exercising out of being tired of doing lot of things again.
Those are probably largely people that probably did just as much activity somewhere other than their home neighborhood (physical-but-nonessential labor, gym, athletic hobbies that rely on now-closed businesses, etc.)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
Not sure I follow
But sudden drop in total number of deaths from 52,992 down to 35,863 in the last week - looks suspicious.
The Fed has spent at least $2 trillion dollars on this already. Probably closer to $6 trillion by the time we are done. It is an unimaginably large cost to shut things down relative to any possible benefit.
That's a failure of imagination.
Looking at the non-spending costs of lost productivity, opportunity costs, etc., it’s a staggering number.
I suppose it’s impossible to know if we’re striking the right balance at the moment, but it’ll be interesting to see the analysis after it’s over.
I’m not saying our response is wrong by the way. But it’s a jaw dropping number. It’s a building a moon base, or universal healthcare for a decade, or a mission to mars, or high speed trains up and down America’s coasts number.
I mean yes, of course it is. But does it do anything to stare and point at it with your jaw dropped? What does the alternate timeline look like where the government had no need to distribute significant amounts of money to employees and businesses?
Early antibody studies have shown that prevalence is much, much higher than positive case count would indicate.
Potentially 50x - 85x more cases than positive tests based on the Santa Clara / Stanford study.
In Boston last week they mass tested at the Pine St homeless shelter and found 50% of them positive and 100% of those were asymptomatic.
If when the dust settles the reality is that the curve wasn’t flattened at all, most everyone was already exposed, and the true IFR was more like 0.25%.... then we flushed $6 trillion down the toilet.
Isn't that like going all in with two aces in texas hold'em poker, and saying "If when the dust settles the reality is that the other guy had a 7 and a 2, and the board was a 3, 4, 5, 6 and a J, then I flushed all my stack down the toilet"? You make the decisions based on the information you have at the time. If you're forced to make a probabilistic call based on what you know then, your decision doesn't become wrong based on the future outcome.
And if you look at New York City for example, can you imagine any scenario where when the dust settles it turns out that we didn't have to do any of that social distancing and stimulus injecting?
Are you making the case that one of the possibilities in this forest of unknowns is that maybe we didn't have to do anything? How does that match up with what we're seeing happening in say, NYC?
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-us-weekly-coronavirus-...
The flu season overlapped with a period that included initial reports and fear of a novel respiratory disease and then historic, mandatory countermeasures (for the vast majority of the population) against communicable respiratory disease; it would be bizarre if there wasn't a big drop in flu deaths.
About 35k people die from car crashes in the U.S. each year (or at least they did). That has always served as my personal benchmark for risks: if I'm more likely to die in a car crash, I don't worry about it.
I worry about Covid-19.
Lifetime risk is a better way of comparing the two because (a) both of them represent lifetime risks and (b) COVID is front-loaded, spreading furiously through the population so your daily risk today is higher than your daily risk of a dying in a car crash, but your lifetime risk remains much lower.
It's also worth calling out the flu has killed 2X as many people as COVID has to date this flu season. A bad flu season in the US kills about 60K people each year.
[1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...
I'm 55 so I'm pretty sure my risk is higher than that. Also, the covid risk is highly front-loaded. If I'm gong to die from covid, I'm likely to do so now whereas if I'm going to die in a car crash that might happen now or it might happen later. I don't really care about dying per se. Sooner or later it's going to happen. What I care about is dying sooner and more painfully than I have to. Drowning on my own bodily fluids doesn't sound like a pleasant way to go.
Further, we have been seeing anywhere from 30-80% of cases are asymptomatic or result in mild flulike symptoms and therefore not accounted for in case fatality rates. Indeed the Gangelt study put the overall infection fatality rate at 0.37% when Germany's case fatality rate is around 2%. It wouldn't surprise me at all if your risk was about 7X lower than the stated 1.3%, as low as 0.25%
I also wouldn't be so quick to assume car crashes are a pleasant way to go.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
Most of the passengers on the Diamond Princes cruise ship were 65+ years old.
Only 0.23% of the passengers died after Covid-19 outbreak.
Additionally, I believe the 1% chance of dying in a car crash is over the course of a lifetime. A 55 year old has likely lived well over half their life and has also aged past a significant chunk of the riskiest time to be in a car (likely 16-30).
I personally believe that given the R0 and the large number of asymptomatic cases, there's no putting this genie back in the bag, and I agree with prominent epidemiologists that we're all going to get it one way or the other -- because nobody's going to stay inside the 18 months it'll take to develop a widespread vaccine. That's why I support Sweden's model. [1] So I just rounded up to 100% and projected out.
> Additionally, I believe the 1% chance of dying in a car crash is over the course of a lifetime. A 55 year old has likely lived well over half their life and has also aged past a significant chunk of the riskiest time to be in a car (likely 16-30).
Good point! I wonder if it's a bimodal distribution. I assume older folks can't get out of the way fast enough as pedestrians and are more likely to get into accidents when driving.
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
I mean they’ve had 15000 recorded cases (of course since they’re letting the disease roam free without a general population testing regimen that’s going to be a minuscule fraction of the denominator which they expect to reach 7 million ish) and 1500 deaths. Crude CFR is 10%.
Bloomberg and the government as of 10 hours ago claim their strategy of “ignoring” a disease that’s just not that fatal is working great, and that unlike the rest of the world they’ll never have to deal with it again as they’re en route to developing herd immunity. [2]
IMO it’s becoming more and more clear that we collectively lost our minds in panic over something that’s just not that bad. The Swedish model is one to replicate.
[1] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...
Your just cherry picking numbers and extrapolating to fit your conclusions. Their CFR is 10% now. 10%. That's extraordinary. You can't dismiss their current stats and then say they don't have a genpop testing regimen as a means of supporting your claims.
And even if you get "lucky" with a crude CFR of 1%, that's disastrous. If just 50% become infected, that's 50K deaths, not 500. And another 250-500K hospitalizations with long lasting effects.
(2) Let's use our noodle for a sec greedo.
They haven't been attempting to control the spread of COVID, and you're telling me they only have 15,000 cases out of a population of 10,000,000 when the R0 is between 2 and 3? Do you genuinely believe that it's not a lack of proper testing? When Gangelt had a seropositive rate of 15% and Santa Clara has 2-5% previously infected?
That would make the denominator not 15,000 but 200,000-1,500,000 or 0.75% to 0.1% which is again in line with IFR estimates we've been seeing lately. Worse than the flu, certainly, but not devastating.
Frankly, that's probably a conservative denominator.
Second as I explained in a peer post, trying to establish the infection fatality rate of the disease based on its case fatality rate is like trying to figure out how risky skydiving is by setting your denominator at "whoever shows up in hospital with skydiving injuries" and the numerator at "whoever survives" -- it's peak adverse selection bias. Can you imagine the government of Sweden telling the population that 1 in 10 of them will die and them being okay with this plan? haha.
Studies are pinning the infection fatality rate at between 0.25% and 1%, and more often than not in the lower quartile of that band -- and almost all of those deaths are the old and sick who should be isolated and protected.
Further, because so many people don't have symptoms and it's so contagious, and the vaccine is at least 12-18 months away, we are all going to get it. Well 70% of us anyways. Sweden is front-loading this burden. Basically none of the numbers are directly comparable, as the minute the US re-opens it'll be playing whack-a-mole with city/state level shutdowns as China is.
Sweden will not.
38,000 people die every year in crashes on US roads. COVID deaths are at 39k and the first COVID-19 death was on Feb. 29. 50 days ago.
Also, it's not a fair comparison between the flu and COVID because the flu has that unfortunate feature known as horizontal gene transfer. That's why you can get re-infected by the flu each year, and why in spite of a massive vaccination campaign the flu causes 45,000,000 illnesses each year in the US alone (and 60,000 deaths) -- and 650,000 deaths worldwide.
Each year. And each upcoming year. COVID will, based on what we know so far, happen once.
There is also a big assumption in considering the risk to be front-loaded. This is not the flu, but it could very well come back next year or in ten years in a different form. We just don't know yet this virus with enough confidence to do this assumption. Anyway, it is a bit strange that the ability for this virus to mutate next year would impact the risk of dying by going out tomorrow which, I think, the person your responded to was thinking about.
Finally, you're saying the flu deaths this year is double what the coronavirus has done, but again the uncertainty is high: the CDC estimation for the flu is from 24,000 to 62,000 deaths this season [1]. So it could be the double, but it could be actually lower. Let's not do things like chosing the estimate that better suits the argument without saying it's a high end of the estimate.
[1] - https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Americas-2019-2020-flu-sea...
There has been no evidence of substantial mutations so far in COVID. There's no evidence that COVID will come back in a new and different form, any more than there's evidence I'll come back next week as a velociraptor. I mean, it could happen, but it's not something I'll plan for until I start sprouting scales and and a giant tail. Mutations are pretty random and the vast majority of mutations are harmful to the virus.
It's worth considering we live with coronaviridae all the time, something like 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronaviridae. [2] There's as much evidence of the common cold becoming Ebola as there is of me becoming a velociraptor.
The flu death range is likely more to do with how good a job we do guessing which the predominant strain will be in a given year, as the flu vaccine efficacy rate ranges from 10% to 60% each year. [1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....
[2] https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common_cold_ca...
> It's also worth calling out the flu has killed 2X as many people as COVID has to date this flu season. A bad flu season in the US kills about 60K people each year.
So far. The flu season started before the covid season so that's a bit of an apples and oranges as you are comparing different time scales. The bigger issue though is its unknown how big covid could get if it balloons. Like its mostly on par with flu now, but its not over yet and that's with the taking of extreme messures to prevent transmission (which we dont do to prevent flu). Measuring potential risk in terms of what's happened so far when we haven't even seen what a complete season of covid look like, feels premature. Jumping off a bridge also looks safe if you base your predictions on the lack of all the bad things that happened before you hit the ground.
You'd need to be a lot more specific. Which state are you referring to? Most US states are safer on Covid mortality than Germany. California + Texas + Florida (the three largest by population) combined have the same population as Germany with half the per capita death rate.
It would be like combining Italy, Spain and Greece and pretending they're all seeing the same situation.
Germany has a per 100k mortality rate of 5 for Covid.
Texas has a per 100k mortality rate of 1.5. California is 2.7. Florida is 3.6.
Germany has 89m people with 4,538 deaths. Texas has 29m people with a mere 453 deaths.
California + Texas + Florida = 89m people, with 2,290 deaths.
More large states? Ohio is 3.9. Virginia is 3. Arizona is 2.4. North Carolina is 1.5.
So as you can see, most of the US in fact doesn't look like New York, New Jersey, Michigan. Just like most of Europe doesn't look like Spain.
More countries in Europe for comparison (per 100k rate):
Belgium 47, Spain 44, Italy 38, France 29, Britain 23, Netherlands 21, Switzerland 16, Sweden 15, Ireland 11.6, Portugal 6.7, Denmark 6, Austria 5, Norway 3, Finland 1.6.
The three largest US states combined have a rate of 2.5.
Lower, if your population is young and healthy. Much lower, if you miraculously stop community spread until medication is available.
Higher, if the disease spreads too fast and hospitals are overloaded, or if your population is old or unhealthy.
Additionally, I’d note that nearly all higher income individuals take steps to reduce their auto death risks including buying safer vehicles, living closer to work, and using professional drivers when drunk or otherwise impaired.
As for your final paragraph, it is wholly unreasonable to imply that covid (which is killing thousands of Americans per day despite a massive distancing effort) is less serious than the flu (which has persisted over a much longer period of time and which was not subject to special responses).
I didn't say or imply that. It's worse than the flu, probably 5-10X worse. Not bad, not great.
I'm suggesting that people are freaking out because there's "bodies on the street" and we're all in serious danger (we're overwhelmingly just not) when the death toll to date is about half of what we paid zero attention to whatsoever over the same time period.
My argument is that we shouldn't be nearly as freaked out about COVID as we are, and we should be more freaked out about the flu.
There's reason to take precautions, especially if you're in a risk category, but not at all to the extent of the panic we've seen to date.
In fact Sweden's plan of literally just that is going great, they've not shut anything down, and told people to stay home if they're sick (shocking, I know) and the serious-case infection growth rate has flattened out by itself. [1, 2]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-19/sweden-sa...
[2] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Canada&location=Sw...
Also there is not enough evidence to believe COVID happens only once per person[1]
South Korea, the country with the best testing so far has reported 116 people re-infected[2], so there IS evidence about it happening.
[0] https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/04/17/organ-dam...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/17/no-evidence-peop...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/200413110301074.html
There's also no evidence it doesn't. What we do know is that the disease hasn't mutated significantly to date, and we see strong antibody response. [1] In time, we'll have a vaccine and it may require a number of booster shots, but what we know so far suggest reason for optimism, not pessimism.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-coronavirus-isnt-m...
1.: Study is not complete yet and is of 500 people in the hardest hit area in Germany[1]
2.: Why do you compare deadly car accidents in the US with COVID-19 mortality rate in Germany?
3.: COVID-19 Mortality rate in the US is 5.3%[2]
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/regional/nordrheinwestfalen/corona...
[2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/17/no-evidence-peop...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/200413110301074.html
Re 2: Because much of the audience here is American, and there's not a similar study of the US population.
Re 3: No, the COVID-19 mortality rate is not 5.3%. The case fatality rate is 5.3%. Those are not the same, for an obvious reason -- currently the overwhelming majority of tests are carried out on people who go to hospital because they're sick. It's adverse selection bias.
For instance, it'd be like trying to measure the fatality rate of skydiving by measuring the odds that someone who ends up in the hospital with a skydiving injury dies. You'd think it's 99% fatal, but of course, it's not.
All you know is the numerator, not the denominator.
[1] https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/04/17/santa-clara-county-...
No, it hasn't.
> A bad flu season in the US kills about 60K people each year.
You're not counting covid-19 deaths and flu deaths using the same methods so you can't compare yet. The method you're using for flu is inclusive and will tend to overcount. The method you're using for covid-19 deaths excludes some deaths and we know it's undercounting covid-19 deaths.
When we get the figures for care home and nursing home deaths included we'll see large increases in covid-19 deaths.
It is dishonest to point to a severe flu season and talk about "flu killing 60k people per year". The range is 12k to 61k. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
Yes, it has. Citation needed, because I provided data and you didn't.
> You're not counting covid-19 deaths and flu deaths using the same methods so you can't compare yet. The method you're using for flu is inclusive and will tend to overcount. The method you're using for covid-19 deaths excludes some deaths and we know it's undercounting covid-19 deaths.
[citation needed]
> When we get the figures for care home and nursing home deaths included we'll see large increases in covid-19 deaths.
That's a totally dishonest way of approaching this when we know for a fact people under 50 have basically no risk from COVID and that folks who are over 70 have easily two orders of magnitude higher risk. In Italy, 99.2% of people who died were age 80.5 and had an average of 3 underlying diseases.
Age 30-39 they had 5 deaths, under 30, 0 deaths at the time this article was written [1] as compared to 852 deaths aged 80-89.
You and I both know the young aren't affected meaningfully, and for them, they won't go to the hospital with a mild cough or with no symptoms at all and so aren't counted in the denominator. You're advocating growing the numerator without growing the denominator to make your case seem stronger than it is.
> It is dishonest to point to a severe flu season and talk about "flu killing 60k people per year". The range is 12k to 61k. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
I don't think it's crazy to compare a "bad COVID year" to a "bad flu year" do you? Our response to a bad flu year is exactly the same as our response to a good flu year. Most people don't really know there is such a thing.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...
Not no evidence [0][1], it's currently my biggest fear about this virus. There's a few possibilities here:
* The tests are picking up dead virus remains
* Their tests were bad and they didn't actually recover
* Their body didn't create enough antibodies and the immunity was weak
* The virus is biphasic - symptoms stop for a while only to return later, and they never actually recovered
My hope is that what we've been seeing turns out to be among the first causes here, but we've been hearing about possible reinfections for months.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-...
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/04/16/could-ame...
Everything you said above are really down in North Korea, and have been so for decades. I doubt they're doing OK
There are fears it will increase domestic abuse.
Would be nice to have the benefits of both: very little motorized traffic AND no viral threat. We have no control over the latter, but we most certainly have some control over the former.
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.
The right organizes groups to show displays of power
The general public can too. Lookit teacher strikes and SOPA
Especially right now with bungling dumbass, people already stuck home, with supplies...
WFH workers should absolutely be striking
SOPA style web blackout, except for supplies services
Or be a fatalist and let old people’s demands to keep their figurative life afloat drive the species off the cliff
Congress would absolutely have to step in as Trump would finally just crumple into his chair and drool
Which is how it was supposed to be in the US. Public pressures Congress into compliance, not each other through government rules about HR and accounting
Humans are biologically programmed to avoid things that make them fearful
Sitting on your butt riding along isn’t stoking much fear in privileged turds
That we have no power at scale is a lack of imagination and to be completely frank, rather pathetic
Web chuds used SOPA to stop their pet issue but can’t be bothered to shut the screen off for the species itself?
Off the cliff we go, I guess
“It’s all the elites fault!”
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
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.
Oh, we could pretty much save the planet and live happily ever after if we could keep it like this.
Only to find some rock barreling down on us some day, but ah... I digress.
I can google you some local media articles if you want to double-check via google translate.
It makes sense though. People spend more time together in close quarters. People lost jobs. Lots of stress all around. Perfect storm for beating that bastard you meet in the kitchen.
The first Figure in this article (Dutch) shows the number of deaths from any cause.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2330786-oversterfte-door-corona-blijf...
During the Corona outbreak, almost double the amount of people are dying compared to the same time last year.
Generally though, covid deaths go up exponentially while road tolls likely don't go down the same way, our trade off is probably only likely if you get in early.
In other news we're likely taking the first step of getting out of out ~1 month lock down later this coming week - our idea of getting out has been described as "lockdown with KFC", roughly equivalent to California's
4,500 ≈ average deaths per month in 2017 [1]
6,125 = confirmed COVID-19 deaths from 2020-04-01 through 2020-04-15 [2]
[1]: https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2017/t...
[2]: https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/ca...
Note that 6,125 doesn’t include COVID-19 deaths or non COVID-19 deaths, and is for the first half of April only.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984?query=RP
Cancers are not getting diagnosed early almost 50% in recent weeks than usual. That means worse stages at diagnosis and worse prognosis
https://www.iknl.nl/nieuws/2020/door-de-covid-19-crisis-zijn...
See https://twitter.com/javierluraschi/status/125160533393750016...
Bad title and bad article.
I personally find it fascinating that for (almost) the first time in living memory we get to have a good long look at what happens when that machine stops. I hope we learn a lot from it.
Only people who lived through rationing in WWII have witnessed a disruption of this size.
Trusting the reader to intuitively know California is losing massive amounts of money from other things seems reasonable. Just because a title isn't written for the most uneducated reader does not mean it is misleading.
Edit: Just because its data, doesn't mean its important. I can't wait to see Cal DOT's surplus after this.
For instance, my niece’s pediatrician apparently has not seen or got calls for any severe cases of flu due to social distancing despite still seeing relatively similar amounts of patients
If I go on vacation and set my Nest to eco mode, am I saving money? Sure, certainly I may be saving $5 a day in home utilities cost on my $300/day vacation. But that is not to say that said vacation is actually saving me money.
It would be accurate to say that vacation may be costing me $295 net instead of $300 face value. But just reporting the savings would be misleading.
Edit: Sorry. Make that 10-100 times greater.
$40 million per day = $14.6 billion per year
The GDP of California is $2.75 trillion.
Your low end estimate of 100x would be a 53% drop in California's GDP, while the 1000x estimate seems impossible.
Are you saying that you disagree that California losing 500% of its GDP seems impossible?
The sheer number of n'th order effects of this crisis might just mean that most of the economic pain is in the long, fat tail spanning decades into the future.
Amortize that cost as irreversible economic damage and it might be implausible, sure, but not inconceivable.
For instance, we're (probably) negatively impacting kids education, that's going to have a negative impact on the economy for the next 50+ years. If we fuck up the food supply chains too badly (e.g. migrant works, locusts in africa [1], etc) more kids will suffer from malnutrition, which has a long term effect. Increased poverty rates from the shutdown will likely increase crime rates (and have many other ill effects), which will have a long term effect. Putting the economy into a recession will no doubt significantly slow down all sorts of R&D work delaying useful (and even life saving) inventions. And so and and so forth.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/africas-huge-locust-...
So OK, make that 10 to 100 times greater.
But perhaps those who are able to WFH are getting a glimpse of what it can be like.
Density has many upsides. Economists have shown that denser cities are correlated with productivity gains at a rate surpassing the density increases.
The lack of it has many costs, and not just the economic ones or less efficient use of resources. Increased motor vehicles on a personal scale leads to obesity, stress.
On a global scale, it is harmful to the planet. Note the news reports of clearer skies from a very cease in this activity.
An example—Overtoom in Amsterdam: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3620058,4.8722503,3a,75y,96....
With investment in public transit (i.e. approximately rebuilding the original streetcar network and building out the existing Metro system) and a high-quality protected bike lane network, LA could be truly amazing.
For one, this situation has nothing to do with cars, so there's no obvious lesson about cars to be drawn from it. Accidents are relatively rare, and when you frame the headline, as another commenter did, as $1 per person-day, it's a lot less impressive.
It's also not viable in a lot of places. Mass transit and living close to work, shopping, and services, is only viable in certain urban centers. NYC, DC, Boston, maybe Chicago are good. LA, not so much (but improving), Dallas, hah! And if you live in a suburb our outside the city? Car.
What will change is habits around traveling. Maybe there will be more working from home (or maybe not). Maybe cities aren't as desirable (or they still are). Maybe there's a broader economic reshuffle. Oil is incredibly cheap right now. Those are the factors that will drive car use over the next few years, not a dollar figure that is, not surprisingly, on the order of what I pay for car insurance. If a $1000 annual insurance bill doesn't keep people out of their cars, why would this headline?
Taking public transit is probably one of the riskiest activities the average person might undertake in their day as far as contracting a virus. Whether or not that will cause people to take their cars instead is unknown, but I can't imagine it will increase ridership in the near term.
Additionally we may see a slowing down or even slight reversal in the trends of populations becoming more urban and more dense. Living in a 400sqft apartment is doable for some people when they're spending most of their free time at bars, parks, restaurants, etc., but after enduring months of those places inaccessible the idea of living in a less-dense suburb may be appealing to people.
I try to rarely leave the house, so when I go I buy enough groceries for 2 weeks or more. That would not be possible without a car.
With a car I also have a lot less contact with other people.
I feel really bad for those people who don't have cars - bus service is severely reduced, and I bet they are having a very hard time.
I go to Vegas. Lose $100K in poker but win $190 at slot machines. How did I do?
It is more accurate to say due to the shutdown.
!!!!
As a back of the envelope for that "$40 Million Per Day" we used to spend, we would have gotten something of greater value. Probably far far greater value.
So we are also losing over "$40 Million Per Day" through lost traffic.
There is no silver lining, it's just giving us a minimum of the value of traffic.
There certainly is a problem with iatrogenic deaths (those caused by medical attention itself), but it would be quite a bit too far to say that surgery is on balance harmful taken as a whole.
(And indeed, the point of my remark was that a falling traffic fatality rate isn't necessarily a good thing, once one looks at the entire picture.)