Dentistry is the last industry I'd watch as a harbinger of the economy. Going to the dentist is truly playing russian roulette with corona. The aerosolization of particles is inevitable as is inhaling them. If there is corona to be aerosolized and transmitted, it will be. I can't imagine anyone getting elective dentistry right now. Then again, many Americans seem to have a death wish right now and would risk their lives for a cleaning.
Most Americans will get COVID, and the risk of death is exceedingly low (0.3%). “Death wish” is exaggerating the situation. If you’re young and healthy (or even middle aged and healthy), it’s reasonable to take what others interpret as risky actions.
Not a domain expert, so I make no predictions myself but do consume data from subject matter experts on the topic.
Healthy middle aged person who wears a mask in public but goes about his life with his family as if nothing happened. Haven’t gotten COVID, but if I do, I’ll take sick days and move on. What else would you expect people to do, hide inside forever? Curve was flattened, there’s no appetite to do so further if necessary, life goes on (or it doesn’t).
It's hard for me to reconcile that you educate yourself by reading what experts are saying and you still are going about your life as if nothing had happened.
Are the policies and incentives so powerful that it's overriding your knowledge that you and your neighbors would be better off if you continued to self-quarantine as much as possible?
I defer to experts. I would assume that once Rt is well below 1 and an aggressive testing apparatus is in place it would be safe to cautiously resume public life.
Yes. I do not agree that me and my neighbors would be better off if we hid inside until 2021; I think the kind of trauma that creates would be more damaging than the worst-case projections for the virus.
I too go about my life as nothing had happened. Simple reason: many people who get it are asymptomatic, many who get it only have mild symptoms, yes few unlucky people will be dead but the number are exceddingly low. Not worth it to be worrying about it.
One only needs to look at Italy, Spain, NYC to spot the main problem(s) with the statement. I'm being generous in attributing them to ignorance - there is a very strong likelihood in today's environment that it's willful mis-statement.
Not the least problem is that it implicitly assumes that others will take steps to reduce the worst effects, so that you don't need to bother. The basic anti-social anti-vax position.
In any case it's so easily dissected that I'm going to invoke Brandolini's Law [1] and decline to waste the time to refute BS.
>One only needs to look at Italy, Spain, NYC to spot the main problem(s) with the statement
Many are asymptotic, many have mild symptom, yes there is deaths but low in number. Is it not the same case as in Italy, Spain, NYC ?
>Not the least problem is that it implicitly assumes that others will take steps to reduce the worst effects, so that you don't need to bother
I don't assumes others will take steps to reduce the worst effects. Even in in the worst case situation where everyone eventually will get infected (including me), it didn't bother me.
There are millions of death happened due to various cases every year even before pandemic. If I let this bother me, I would be depressed all the time. Why would I want that?
As I said earlier, I'm not inclined to participate in the refutation of BS, which is what you are trolling out.
This is a once-a-century pandemic of a virus that is not at all the influenza or any other common virus. If left to itself it would kill, most likely, millions in the US alone. That's not millions who were going to die anyway, it is millions of avoidable deaths with 10's of millions of years of life extinguished.
The sociopathic narcissism of individuals who feel like that's fine as long as they personally don't feel at risk, which this exchange typifies, is deplorable.
Will we be better off if we self-quarantine as long as possible? Under the assumption that a fixed percentage of Americans will get COVID-19 in the long run and that treatments will not improve, then self-quarantining may delay getting it and has some chance of pushing those who self-quarantine more effectively into the not-getting it category but will make little difference to the overall mortality rate. So, for increased isolation to make a big difference, something has to break one of those assumptions. Possibilities include:
A vaccine. This may well happen in under a year. How much of a difference this makes will depend on the efficacy of a vaccine and how many people get it.
Improved treatments. Some experts seem optimistic about monoclonal antibodies. Cost, production, and ability to administer early enough in the course of the disease are still unknown.
Living in a country that is actually suppressing the disease. Countries that have competently managed COVID-19 are not on a course that will eventually infect a large fraction of the population. It seems likely that if all countries were this competent, then COVID-19 could be eradicated without a vaccine.
I think that a significant part of what people see as an aggressive response is read backwards on the countries that happen to have had good results. There are a lot of countries and regions who were praised for their aggressive response in March and April, who've now been memory-holed as their pandemic ramps up. It's fair to say the US made missteps that South Korea didn't, but the idea that there's some universally correct response which can be imposed from the top by fiat seems incompatible with the facts on the ground.
> As of May 1, 23,430 people are estimated to have died out of a total population of 8,398,748 in New York City. This corresponds to a 0.28% crude mortality rate to date, or 279 deaths per 100,000 population, or 1 death every 358 people. Note that the Crude Mortality Rate will continue to increase as more infections and deaths occur (see notes under the paragraph "Herd Immunity" below for details).
From a Google search of “Covid mortality rate”. As a healthy person, I would remain comfortable even if the death rate is substantially higher under the assumption that one can’t self quarantine forever and infection is inevitable.
"Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) = Deaths / Cases = 23,430 / 1,694,781 = 1.4% (1.4% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have a fatal outcome, while 98.6% recover)"
So 1.4%, about 4.67 times higher than what you say.
That said I may have misunderstood so corrections welcome.
Not a domain expert, perhaps I misinterpreted the rate posted (CMR vs IFR). I’m still comfortable with those odds you commented with (1.4%). If I was twice my age or had underlying health issues, I might be more concerned, but this falls within my personal risk tolerance.
She said: "We are seeing that patients are suffering from moderate to severe acute kidney injury in about 20-30% of patients and 30% of patients who are admitted to intensive care for Covid infection are requiring dialysis so the numbers are much bigger than we envisaged based on the data coming out of China." (published May 2nd)
I’m being pragmatic with a touch of nihilism, although I can see how that would appear to be complacent or caviler to an observer.
I’m unwilling to live in my home as if it’s a moon base until a vaccine is developed, which could be 6-18 months from now, but as I mention elsewhere in this thread I wear a mask whenever I’m in public (to prevent impacting others if I happen to be a carrier but am asymptomatic). If you’re concerned for my health, appreciate it, but we’re all dead eventually.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "remain comfortable"?
You mention in another comment that you do wear a mask. Are there other things you would do if they were simple and were likely to, if done by a statistically substantial number of people, save lives?
Getting people to wear masks (not even all the time everywhere, just in public buildings/crowds) and stay home when they are obviously sick will make a huge difference, but we as a country seem to have said "fuck it, that's too hard".
Propose something else simple to do beyond wearing a mask, washing and sanitizing hands frequently, etc. Self quarantine is not simple, and it is unreasonable to request it indefinitely.
We don’t fly at all (lot of miles expected on the EVs this year, single use nitrile gloves for handling Supercharger stall cabling). We avoid all crowds (requested refunds for upcoming concerts instead of electing to go). Anything else?
Did you avoid crowds prior to Covid, or is that something you do differently but didn't acknowledge?
How about temperature checks after potential exposure?
I also think you are missing my point. I'm not trying to enumerate all the possibilities, I'm pointing to there being quite a lot of options between quarantine and going back to life the way it was. If we talk about things like concerts being choices, more people look at them that way. If we figure out the small mitigations that make the biggest difference and get them widely adopted, everybody wins.
Unfortunately, there are too many stakeholders and not enough coordination for the efforts you describe to be implemented in the US. People don’t even want to wear masks, so most of what you’re asking for is beyond our grasp collectively. It is what it is.
> “I got every f—ing right to not wear a mask,” he said. “This isn’t about wearing a mask, it’s about control. I’m not the f—ing sheep ... I was one of the only people in that store not wearing a mask.”
The mistake you might make is to assume that this feeling is held by a single person. The data indicates there is a broad contingent of citizens who adhere to these views, therefore your suggestion (“If we figure out the small mitigations that make the biggest difference and get them widely adopted, everybody wins.”) would “impose on their freedoms”, making broad scale implementation untenable.
Meanwhile protests in the US are resulting in actual change to public policy when it comes to police (for instance, Colorado has ended qualified immunity).
The first step to change is to want it. That some people in 10 and 20 years will still look back wistfully at the Trump years is disappointing, but it's no reason to give up on changing things that need changing.
And one thing that is worth considering is to work on the change so that it has happened, in whatever amount it has happened, if/when a more difficult pandemic comes along, one where analyzing your own fate doesn't leave you feeling comfortable.
A death wish is not necessarily for oneself. Most Americans are wishing death upon others. Statistically, the younger and healthier, the more likely they are to kill someone else rather than themselves. Doesn't make it any less risky or horrifying. Well, it does to many Americans who simply do not care if their actions kill others. It's part of the culture as can be readily seen now and in the past.
I've been scheduled for an implant for ~4 months now, and waiting for things to calm down before getting it done - but it's not exactly "elective" - there are serious health consequences of not getting the work done - it will be more painful and more expensive the longer I wait. So I get to balance increased pain with increased risk of infectious disease. Compared to most things, it's absolutely a legitimate barometer of how safe I feel doing the riskiest activities _that I have to do_.
I'm pretty much in the same boat. I was scheduled for a crown when things shut down. After they opened, they called me to reschedule. Sure I could hold off some number of months but I actually had some temporary sensitivity in the tooth so it seemed reasonable on balance to go ahead and get it done. (And, if I were in the office for the temporary crown anyway, I might as well get my rescheduled cleaning done anyway which is also "elective" up to some point, but who knows what outbreaks could happen that shut things down again.
So, yes, it's a risk but it seems a reasonable calculated one. Others may of course disagree.
"How long it takes those jobs to come back entirely will be a crucial indicator of whether Americans feel safe returning to normal activities, and if they have the economic means to do so.
“I’m obsessed with dentists because, if the only thing we’re doing is putting the economy on pause, and then going back to normal, all of them should be coming back,” Ms. Stevenson said. “We’re not really recovered until all the dentists are back to work.”
A lot of dentistry is elective just like other forms of preventative care. But that doesn't mean you should push it off indefinitely. And if you look at the various projections, it increasingly doesn't look as if pushing this sort of thing out a couple of months will necessarily get you to the point where "everything's fine!" People don't go to dentists because it's a fun but unnecessary activity.
What’s strange to me about all these stories is their veiled, counterfactual suggestion that any of this is really safe given the trajectory the US is on.
If the US had reacted early and competently, like South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, or many other countries, people could be going to dentists without too much concern. But we didn’t, are on a bad and dangerous path, and now have to somehow pretend that we’re not, based solely on popular sentiment.
The reality of COVID-19, how it spreads, and what’s proven to quash it have absolutely nothing to do with how people feel about the pandemic.
South Korea is an island? That’s news to me. Their major COVID outbreak started about the same time as our’s. See also Vietnam. And they both share a border with China.
South Korea's only land border is with North Korea. The GP was correct that (in this context) for practical purposes South Korea is an "island" because there's relatively little land travel between North- and South Korea.
COVID-19 is endemic. Even if first-world countries like the ones you mention can control it, it just takes one infected traveller from a 2nd/3rd world country to restart the whole thing.
The reality is that COVID is a relatively minor ailment, which is not deadly for the vast majority of people - the CDC estimates its IFR at 0.26%:
I think its quite likely that without the media storm, we would have put it down as a really bad flu, once in a quarter century, and got on with life. Last time Sweden's death rate was this high was during their 1993 Flu pandemic (an event which is entirely forgotten).
The underlying factor is the aging of populations in the West. Look at the forecast age profile for Italy in 2050: https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2050/ about 13% of the population will be aged over 80! Mundane flu waves will kill scores of people, simply due to the demographics.
It is unfair to throw the rest of the planet's population under the bus to protect Baby Boomers in the West.
Its also remarkable that we can muster such effort to 'save' a fraction of the population, already sick and elderly, yet do very little to combat climate change which will impact humanity and the planet forever - not to mention the lives saved now from reducing air pollution.
The economic downturns are cause by the pandemic, not the lockdowns, and the lockdowns are the result of poor response to the pandemic that resulted in uncontrolled community spread. People keep mixing up cause and effect in talking about this. Taiwan and South Korea didn’t have lockdowns.
Taleb has a good debate with Ioannidis about why his forecasting on the epidemic is wrong. I side with his view:
Is your argument that at the moment there are no excess deaths? Because the CDC data you links says there have been a lot of excess deaths. Why do you think there won’t be a log more when we have uncontrolled spread in many regions in the US?
Sorry you’re getting downvoted for posting facts. Hacker news has always been filled with free thinking, intelligent people. I’m not sure what happened.
People comparing flu to covid need to be aware that sentences like this (from your Hopkins link) pack a lot of hidden stuff about the different ways of counting death:
> In the U.S., from Oct. 1, 2019 – Apr. 4, 2020, the CDC estimates that 24,000 to 62,000 people died from the flu. (The CDC does not know the exact number because the flu is not a reportable disease in most parts of the U.S.)
Those estimates are complex statistical modelling that use a combination of laboratory confirmed cases, death certificates, excess mortality, but also sampling of calls to primary care for flu like symptoms.
The Covid-19 deaths talked about on the Hopkins page are complex, but they come from states and many states are reporting deaths for people who were confirmed by testing to have had covid-19, or where covid-19 was listed as the cause of death (but not just listed) on the death certificate.
I mean, what do you make of Brazil? Is it full of "Western Baby Boomers"? And India? The new cases have largely shifted to those places where the first wave is/was slower, outside Western Europe. Whether the West should force them to do anything is moot.
Your comment sounds to me like yet another assessment of the situation that is based on the implicit (false) idea that the situation is static. Or that many places are not already reopening and seeing the consequences.
It's not just that there are active cases, but there are more cases every day. It's not just that there are new cases every day, but that the daily new cases are increasing. It's not just that the daily new cases are increasing, but that the rate of increase is increasing. I think that's like...the third derivative?
The global daily death rate does, and would be expected to, lag new cases substantially, but it has stopped declining and looks to be picking up.
Your last point is why you got an upvote. For the economic cost of this lockdown we probably could have eliminated coal entirely from the world's energy mix (except maybe metal refining), which would have cut CO2 emission to pre-1990s levels.
On the flip side we went utterly apeshit as a culture (and still have not recovered) over terrorism, which has killed only a tiny fraction of COVID or even the flu.
I don't quite buy your rosy numbers on COVID, but that being said this does show how irrational we are about risk. IMHO we way overreacted to 9/11, are possibly overreacting or at least mis-reacting to this, and are ignoring climate change which could be much worse than this.
Any discussion of Covid-19 that merely focuses on death rate and not DALY[1] is intellectually frivolous. There's not a medical intervention in the world that can save lives, they can only be prolonged.
> New data on COVID-19 is available daily; information about its biological and epidemiological characteristics remain limited, and uncertainty remains around nearly all parameter values.
> The parameters in the scenarios:
Are estimates intended to support public health preparedness and planning.
Are not predictions of the expected effects of COVID-19.
Do not reflect the impact of any behavioral changes, social distancing, or other interventions.
The CDC only lists the estimate for CFR (.4%) on that page.
If you consider their projection that 35% of all infected cases remain asymptomatic (same page), the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) drops to just 0.26 %.
But they give 5 projections, and they say that none of these are accurate estimations, they're only to be used for modelling, and that they will change as new information is found.
There's just not much value at this point in discussing what might have counterfactually happened. Getting out of the current crisis takes priority over preparing for the next one.
The Hacker News crowd tends to be pretty well off, so I imagine it’s that classic Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I'm not sure what that statement has to do with mine. Many medical procedures/visits that don't need to happen right now should nonetheless not be postponed indefinitely. Dental cleaning is certainly one of those. Others are operations to correct chronic pain or to forestall a future emergency.
Now, you're certainly welcome to think that we should continue pushing those kind of visits/procedures out indefinitely but health officials in most places disagree.I'm being quite conservative in general but I have gone back to the dentist since they reopened.
No, my definition of denialism is someone who 'till this day is still defending the "it's just the flu" meme, just in a little more sophisticated package.
> I think its quite likely that without the media storm, we would have put it down as a really bad flu, once in a quarter century, and got on with life. Last time Sweden's death rate was this high was during their 1993 Flu pandemic (an event which is entirely forgotten). [1]
Given the innovation we've seen from some industries in these times, I'm surprised I haven't seen any in dentistry.
I'm probably just naïve about the challenges – or maybe it's happening and I'm just not aware. But I'm surprised my family (3 dental offices between us) hasn't gotten any emails from our dentists selling cleaning kits with elaborate instructions or offering Zoom consultations where they ask the same old questions they'd be asking at a cleaning, planning treatment, etc.
Yes, I realize these things are no replacement for regular cleanings or appointments, but certainly they'd be better than... nothing?
I'm pretty sure many dentists are open to remote consultations. I know my doctor is. I assume my dentist would be as well.
I'm not sure what remote cleaning would look like other than "Be particularly observant to your brushing and flossing." I imagine untrained people hacking around with dental tools would cause more harm than good.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadHealthy middle aged person who wears a mask in public but goes about his life with his family as if nothing happened. Haven’t gotten COVID, but if I do, I’ll take sick days and move on. What else would you expect people to do, hide inside forever? Curve was flattened, there’s no appetite to do so further if necessary, life goes on (or it doesn’t).
Can’t fault people for responding to incentives and policy accordingly.
Are the policies and incentives so powerful that it's overriding your knowledge that you and your neighbors would be better off if you continued to self-quarantine as much as possible?
Not the least problem is that it implicitly assumes that others will take steps to reduce the worst effects, so that you don't need to bother. The basic anti-social anti-vax position.
In any case it's so easily dissected that I'm going to invoke Brandolini's Law [1] and decline to waste the time to refute BS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Many are asymptotic, many have mild symptom, yes there is deaths but low in number. Is it not the same case as in Italy, Spain, NYC ?
>Not the least problem is that it implicitly assumes that others will take steps to reduce the worst effects, so that you don't need to bother
I don't assumes others will take steps to reduce the worst effects. Even in in the worst case situation where everyone eventually will get infected (including me), it didn't bother me.
Like I said, the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands to millions doesn't bother you. That is repugnant, and sociopathic.
This is a once-a-century pandemic of a virus that is not at all the influenza or any other common virus. If left to itself it would kill, most likely, millions in the US alone. That's not millions who were going to die anyway, it is millions of avoidable deaths with 10's of millions of years of life extinguished.
The sociopathic narcissism of individuals who feel like that's fine as long as they personally don't feel at risk, which this exchange typifies, is deplorable.
A vaccine. This may well happen in under a year. How much of a difference this makes will depend on the efficacy of a vaccine and how many people get it.
Improved treatments. Some experts seem optimistic about monoclonal antibodies. Cost, production, and ability to administer early enough in the course of the disease are still unknown.
Living in a country that is actually suppressing the disease. Countries that have competently managed COVID-19 are not on a course that will eventually infect a large fraction of the population. It seems likely that if all countries were this competent, then COVID-19 could be eradicated without a vaccine.
> As of May 1, 23,430 people are estimated to have died out of a total population of 8,398,748 in New York City. This corresponds to a 0.28% crude mortality rate to date, or 279 deaths per 100,000 population, or 1 death every 358 people. Note that the Crude Mortality Rate will continue to increase as more infections and deaths occur (see notes under the paragraph "Herd Immunity" below for details).
From a Google search of “Covid mortality rate”. As a healthy person, I would remain comfortable even if the death rate is substantially higher under the assumption that one can’t self quarantine forever and infection is inevitable.
"Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) = Deaths / Cases = 23,430 / 1,694,781 = 1.4% (1.4% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have a fatal outcome, while 98.6% recover)"
So 1.4%, about 4.67 times higher than what you say.
That said I may have misunderstood so corrections welcome.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-ris... (New York Times: Putting the Risk of Covid-19 in Perspective)
She said: "We are seeing that patients are suffering from moderate to severe acute kidney injury in about 20-30% of patients and 30% of patients who are admitted to intensive care for Covid infection are requiring dialysis so the numbers are much bigger than we envisaged based on the data coming out of China." (published May 2nd)
It's not die-or-recover-completely.
I’m unwilling to live in my home as if it’s a moon base until a vaccine is developed, which could be 6-18 months from now, but as I mention elsewhere in this thread I wear a mask whenever I’m in public (to prevent impacting others if I happen to be a carrier but am asymptomatic). If you’re concerned for my health, appreciate it, but we’re all dead eventually.
You mention in another comment that you do wear a mask. Are there other things you would do if they were simple and were likely to, if done by a statistically substantial number of people, save lives?
Getting people to wear masks (not even all the time everywhere, just in public buildings/crowds) and stay home when they are obviously sick will make a huge difference, but we as a country seem to have said "fuck it, that's too hard".
Avoid dense crowds.
Etc.
How about temperature checks after potential exposure?
I also think you are missing my point. I'm not trying to enumerate all the possibilities, I'm pointing to there being quite a lot of options between quarantine and going back to life the way it was. If we talk about things like concerts being choices, more people look at them that way. If we figure out the small mitigations that make the biggest difference and get them widely adopted, everybody wins.
(note that we are on equal footing here, asserting opinions, I just did it more curtly)
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-do-so-many-americans-r...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/masks-coronaviru...
My favorite, from a Costco:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/i-woke-up-in-a-free-countr...
> “I got every f—ing right to not wear a mask,” he said. “This isn’t about wearing a mask, it’s about control. I’m not the f—ing sheep ... I was one of the only people in that store not wearing a mask.”
The mistake you might make is to assume that this feeling is held by a single person. The data indicates there is a broad contingent of citizens who adhere to these views, therefore your suggestion (“If we figure out the small mitigations that make the biggest difference and get them widely adopted, everybody wins.”) would “impose on their freedoms”, making broad scale implementation untenable.
The first step to change is to want it. That some people in 10 and 20 years will still look back wistfully at the Trump years is disappointing, but it's no reason to give up on changing things that need changing.
And one thing that is worth considering is to work on the change so that it has happened, in whatever amount it has happened, if/when a more difficult pandemic comes along, one where analyzing your own fate doesn't leave you feeling comfortable.
I've been scheduled for an implant for ~4 months now, and waiting for things to calm down before getting it done - but it's not exactly "elective" - there are serious health consequences of not getting the work done - it will be more painful and more expensive the longer I wait. So I get to balance increased pain with increased risk of infectious disease. Compared to most things, it's absolutely a legitimate barometer of how safe I feel doing the riskiest activities _that I have to do_.
So, yes, it's a risk but it seems a reasonable calculated one. Others may of course disagree.
That's what "elective" means. Planned in advance, non-emergency.
“I’m obsessed with dentists because, if the only thing we’re doing is putting the economy on pause, and then going back to normal, all of them should be coming back,” Ms. Stevenson said. “We’re not really recovered until all the dentists are back to work.”
For these groups, Coronavirus might be a death sentence.
If the US had reacted early and competently, like South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, or many other countries, people could be going to dentists without too much concern. But we didn’t, are on a bad and dangerous path, and now have to somehow pretend that we’re not, based solely on popular sentiment.
The reality of COVID-19, how it spreads, and what’s proven to quash it have absolutely nothing to do with how people feel about the pandemic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Vietnam
Map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?ie=UTF8&hl=en&source=em...
The reality is that COVID is a relatively minor ailment, which is not deadly for the vast majority of people - the CDC estimates its IFR at 0.26%:
https://in.dental-tribune.com/news/new-estimate-by-the-cdc-b...
There are already no excess deaths in the USA: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
I think its quite likely that without the media storm, we would have put it down as a really bad flu, once in a quarter century, and got on with life. Last time Sweden's death rate was this high was during their 1993 Flu pandemic (an event which is entirely forgotten).
If we value life, we are about to bring a huge amount of misery to the world from our lockdown policies, already pushing 71 million into extreme poverty: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...
And allowing existing, mundane diseases to spread rapidly: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
The underlying factor is the aging of populations in the West. Look at the forecast age profile for Italy in 2050: https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2050/ about 13% of the population will be aged over 80! Mundane flu waves will kill scores of people, simply due to the demographics.
It is unfair to throw the rest of the planet's population under the bus to protect Baby Boomers in the West.
Its also remarkable that we can muster such effort to 'save' a fraction of the population, already sick and elderly, yet do very little to combat climate change which will impact humanity and the planet forever - not to mention the lives saved now from reducing air pollution.
Taleb has a good debate with Ioannidis about why his forecasting on the epidemic is wrong. I side with his view:
https://forecasters.org/blog/2020/06/14/covid-19-ioannidis-v...
Is your argument that at the moment there are no excess deaths? Because the CDC data you links says there have been a lot of excess deaths. Why do you think there won’t be a log more when we have uncontrolled spread in many regions in the US?
Also, please can you post a link to the CDC document where the IFR is listed at 0.26%?
I’ve seen stuff comparing it to the flu but I’ll have to dig around.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
In the U.S, 119,131 people have died of COVID-19, as of June 20, 2020.
In the U.S., from Oct. 1, 2019 – Apr. 4, 2020, the CDC estimates that 24,000 to 62,000 people died from the flu.
So I’d entertain the idea that COVID is 2-4 times worse than the Flu. (But you could imagine a bad flu season coming close to that.)
However Flu targets more young people so perhaps if we look at years of life lost that gap would close further.
> In the U.S., from Oct. 1, 2019 – Apr. 4, 2020, the CDC estimates that 24,000 to 62,000 people died from the flu. (The CDC does not know the exact number because the flu is not a reportable disease in most parts of the U.S.)
Those estimates are complex statistical modelling that use a combination of laboratory confirmed cases, death certificates, excess mortality, but also sampling of calls to primary care for flu like symptoms.
The Covid-19 deaths talked about on the Hopkins page are complex, but they come from states and many states are reporting deaths for people who were confirmed by testing to have had covid-19, or where covid-19 was listed as the cause of death (but not just listed) on the death certificate.
Your comment sounds to me like yet another assessment of the situation that is based on the implicit (false) idea that the situation is static. Or that many places are not already reopening and seeing the consequences.
It's not just that there are active cases, but there are more cases every day. It's not just that there are new cases every day, but that the daily new cases are increasing. It's not just that the daily new cases are increasing, but that the rate of increase is increasing. I think that's like...the third derivative?
The global daily death rate does, and would be expected to, lag new cases substantially, but it has stopped declining and looks to be picking up.
On the flip side we went utterly apeshit as a culture (and still have not recovered) over terrorism, which has killed only a tiny fraction of COVID or even the flu.
I don't quite buy your rosy numbers on COVID, but that being said this does show how irrational we are about risk. IMHO we way overreacted to 9/11, are possibly overreacting or at least mis-reacting to this, and are ignoring climate change which could be much worse than this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year
You've misunderstood this. Why didn't you link to the original CDC document? Please could you show where CDC estimates IFR at 0.26%?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
> New data on COVID-19 is available daily; information about its biological and epidemiological characteristics remain limited, and uncertainty remains around nearly all parameter values.
> The parameters in the scenarios:
If you consider their projection that 35% of all infected cases remain asymptomatic (same page), the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) drops to just 0.26 %.
https://twitter.com/Mary_Plastic/status/1274525635638149120?...
Because the ICU is full of covid patients that means there's less capacity for young people after road traffic accidents.
Now, you're certainly welcome to think that we should continue pushing those kind of visits/procedures out indefinitely but health officials in most places disagree.I'm being quite conservative in general but I have gone back to the dentist since they reopened.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23593222
I'm probably just naïve about the challenges – or maybe it's happening and I'm just not aware. But I'm surprised my family (3 dental offices between us) hasn't gotten any emails from our dentists selling cleaning kits with elaborate instructions or offering Zoom consultations where they ask the same old questions they'd be asking at a cleaning, planning treatment, etc.
Yes, I realize these things are no replacement for regular cleanings or appointments, but certainly they'd be better than... nothing?
I'm not sure what remote cleaning would look like other than "Be particularly observant to your brushing and flossing." I imagine untrained people hacking around with dental tools would cause more harm than good.