> This suggests that COVID-19 very roughly contributes a year’s worth of risk.
Yes. If I get all the medical care I need, then I have only an 0.15% chance of dying. (Well, more than that, because I'm male, and our numbers are twice as bad.)
But I have a 4.9% chance of being hospitalized, which generally means supplemental oxygen and an IV. And if we let this disease just burn through the population, then my state would be looking at something like 13,000 hospitalizations for 700 beds. And the numbers get much worse for older people.
Personally, I could live with an 0.15% chance of death. But a 4.9% chance of getting stuck in a field triage hospital with inadequate care, struggling to breathe? Not so much. And what about my older relatives?
> You are not taking into account the asymptomatic rate
I'm using the Imperial College of London hospitalization numbers, from the table quoted in the article. These give a hospitalization rate that's about half that of earlier tables. So I'm guessing they probably include around 50% mostly asymptomatic cases, which is in line with heavily-tested populations like the Diamond Princess and South Korea.
You're right, I was misreading the column header. If we assume 50% asymptomatic, then that would get me down to, say, a 2.5% chance of needing a hospital.
Which means, in the absence of drastic curve flattening measures, a 2.5% chance of half-drowning in my own lungs in a hospital corridor full of cots. Still sounds pretty awful.
The key number we're missing is how many people catch the virus, but who defeat it quickly enough that they never show up on an RNA test. We'll need antibody surveys to figure that out. The Diamond Princess had 712 positive out of 3,711, but some people were tested fairly late. So if we assume half the ship caught it, that could cut the numbers in half again.
> So if we assume half the ship caught it, that could cut the numbers in half again.
Actually by a factor of four if we assume that the virus managed to reach everyone it was going to reach on the cruise ship and doesn't spread better on land.
And if only those 712 caught it, that reduces your number by a factor of five. So we are already down from 4.9% to between 0.5% and 0.625-1.25%.
It seems logical to state, at least within the US, the accuracy of deaths due to COVID-19 are more accurate than total cases of COVID-19. There are a lot of asymptomatic people out there. Even if someone has it with mild symptoms they are told to stay home and only reach the hospital if symptoms are severe. Deaths are more accurate as I assume a test can be performed posthumously for COVID-19.
So, even with this exaggerated ratio, the US has 5 deaths/1M pop. One can reasonably argue this might've been worse if no quarantine measures were in place. However if the true rate is less than 1%, I think the economic effects will be more impactful.
The above link also shows ~27k deaths worldwide due to COVID-19 at the moment. Italy had ~25k deaths due to the flu alone in 2016/2017.
That number is still rising exponentially though in Western countries due to lack of social distancing and mask wearing discipline. I fear we'll be approaching a million deaths worldwide in a matter of weeks.
Or the ‘just a little cough’ rate or the ‘I probably have it, but I’ll just stay away from people until it goes away’ rate, which is probably pretty high.
My mom had had an upper respiratory problem for about a month and they still haven’t tested her. She was just given some antibiotics a week ago; but, even if she has a bacterial infection now, couldn’t it have started as a viral one to make her sick enough to get the bacterial one this bad?
We’ll have to do statistics analysis in the coming months and years to get some real numbers on this. As of now, we’re still missing lots of data.
You are right. According to the Robert-Koch-Institut, even in Germany, where there is a lot of testing being done, the number of actual cases is probably a lot higher than the number of confirmed cases. We are talking about 10x or higher.
It was in a press conference with the German minister of health and the RKI. The British chief medical advisor estimated 20x in Britain. Of course nobody really knows at this point. In Germany, a large-scale study using antibody tests is starting next week to estimate the true numbers.
Just to provide some info, asymptomatic might include people who are infected but the infection is just on the incubation period. Mild coughing might start after two weeks or so after the plausible date of infection, and a week after that might be when fever and difficulty breathing kicks in.
In Bergamo (Northern Italy, 120,000 inhabitants) in the last two years, the average number of deaths between 1 and 24 March has been 98 people. This year it’s 446, clearly because COVID. Many COVID death are not reported because of absence of official verification.Data source (https://www.bergamonews.it/2020/03/27/gori-a-bergamo-dall1-a...).
The data in the article tell us that most of those 446 deaths in which C19 played a part would have happened in the next few years anyway.
So we would expect fewer people to die in Bergamo next year, because they died this year instead. And then fewer than normal expected the year after, and so on, although it gets increasingly noisy with time.
We’re measuring the impact of COVID in deaths, by and large. A more useful unit for some purposes is quality-adjusted-life-years (QALYs).
For people who die, the QALY impact of C19 would have been how many years of full health the person had left, if they had not died after catching the virus.
But similarly, for people who don’t die shortly after contracting it, C19 can still have a QALY impact, and we’re not reporting or even measuring that much. Patients often have reduced lunch function even after “recovering”; there will be patients in whom C19 triggers post viral fatigue, which can last years; in the worst cases patients will be stuck with ME/CFS or similar for the rest of their lives.
Very little about the philosophy, economics, politics or science of dealing with C19 is simple. Although clearly some things are: if I don’t go near people with the virus, I won’t catch it; if we flatten the curve, fewer patients will die; the old and the infirm are more at risk. But those few simple parts don’t necessarily make the whole simple.
In Italy about 1% of people die every year, which is roughly consistent with 98 people in a month.
If the virus causes one year's worth of extra deaths, these will not be spread out over the whole year, so seeing 350 of them in a month of the epidemic would also not seem out of place, it corresponds to an epidemic whose peak is a few months long. So this data doesn't seem inconsistent with the linked article's estimates.
Of course if you are running a morgue, then 448 instead of 98 is the relevant figure, and is likely to be very difficult to handle. And if you are running a hospital, even worse.
Also, another kind of situations that in other moment could be survivable (heart attack for example) could be deadly because the saturation of the ambulances and health system in general. Those aren’t atribuible to Covid directly, but indirectly are caused by it.
> So, roughly speaking, we might say that getting COVID-19 is like packing a year’s worth of risk into a week or two.
Sure, but it also means these deaths are piled up on top of everything else. It's not like people will stop dying of other causes.
> many people who die of COVID would have died anyway within a short period
This strikes me as completely unfounded. Diabetes or an age > 70 aren't imminent death sentences in a developed country.
> if COVID deaths can be kept in the order of say 20,000 by stringent suppression measures, as is now being suggested, there may end up being a minimal impact on overall mortality
In a sense this is a tautology. Of course, if we keep deaths to a low number there won't be an impact on mortality rates.
> Sure, but it also means these deaths are piled up on top of everything else. It's not like people will stop dying of other causes.
You're misunderstanding: the people who die of COVID-19 will stop dying of other causes, because they've died of COVID-19. There will be a decrease in other-cause mortality...
>In a sense this is a tautology. Of course, if we keep deaths to a low number there won't be an impact on mortality rates.
...thus what it means is that if the COVID-19 deaths are kept to people who are ill enough that they would have died within the year anyway, those deaths won't be extra mortality across the year. If on the other hand COVID-19 spreads a lot and kills people who wouldn't have otherwise died, there will be extra mortality.
Even among the chronically ill and the elderly, the number that die in any given year will be dwarfed by that of covid deaths (if the virus burns through the population).
This risk measures risk to expected lifespan with and without COVID-19. It's a good way to put things into context.
If you compare deaths directly, you get really horrific numbers.
For example: Covid will kill significantly more people in the US than WWII and the deaths will occur within roughly a year or year and a half. (WWII lasted 4 years for the US but the popuation was also smaller). If that sounds horrible and unacceptable, consider that tobacco related deaths (including second hand smoke) in the US kill more than WWII every year. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
Because the deaths will come in short time span and hospitals will be out of capacity the situation will be warlike in countries that fail mitigation. Hospitals running out of capacity kills more of people than the disease. Isolation failures due to hospitals not having testing equipment and protective gear will add unnecessary deaths too. The risk from the disease itself is comparable to lifestyle risks and many other risks.
Automobile accidents are order of magnitude smaller risk.
In the US automobiles kill roughly the same amount of people annually as year in the Vietnam war. Something like 30k+ annually. You can actually subtract some car deaths from covid deaths because there is less traffic.
9/11 or terrorism in general so low risks that it's quite clear that responding for terrorism with conventional war and trillions of dollars is insane.
What about after accounting for life years lost? Young people are most likely to die in auto accidents, and they may have 50-60 years of expected life left, whereas the majority of deaths from coronavirus would be people who have way fewer years left.
Not relevant. There are trillions of vehicle trips each year. In 2018, only 36,560 deaths. The likelihood of a fatal car accident is a less than 1% of 1% of 1%.
There have been only a few hundred thousand cases of COVID19 so far, and thousands of deaths. The fatality rate is many magnitudes greater.
Those accidents are no basically longer happening because there are so few cars on the road. Our response to this also solved auto accidents. You should be asking "how does this compare to causes of death related to poverty"
Where I am, I don’t see less car traffic. We are moderate in terms of US states for cases. We are told to only leave the house for urgent matters. But the chic-fil-a drive through line is 45 cars deep.
The comments on the post suggest there are some major flaws. One graph compares two different rates on the same axis, and some others show small difference in logarithmic scales.
Can anyone look into these criticisms and see if they hold weight?
What that comment is saying is that the two axis have different units (a unitless risk for covid case fatality and a time^-1 rate for mortality), so you can't compare them. Which is true, but if you multiply the rate by 1 year, then the units become the same and the values don't change, so that becomes comparable. I still think it makes sense to compare the risk of dying of covid-19 if you catch it vs the risk of dying of any cause in the next 12 months. 1 to 2 years worth of risk still seems like a lot to me
Right, and plotting the comparison to 1 year's risk seems entirely sensible to me. That seems approximately the right "compared to what?" scale to be using, otherwise almost any numbers multiplied by 300 million end up looking huge.
One thing this plot does very well is put into perspective the extra risk to the elderly.
Valid criticisms. Linear plot has been added but doesn't resolve the unit difference. The whole article tries to ask the right question but goes down the wrong path.
Deaths are easy to count, but I'm far more interested in what Covid-19 does to survivors. I find reports of permanent lung damage showing up in scans of people who never even noticed an acute illness far more concerning than any single digit death percentage.
Just tidbits, nothing worth referring. But too many to for comfort. Systematic studies either don't exist or they get lost in the noise of death-counting. It's particularly hard to find even speculative opinion because the same lung damage keywords that would describe outcomes are also preconditions associated with greatly elevated risk, so there's naturally a lot of charter about that.
Why shouldn't an activist focus on one particular issue?
People are sometimes more interested in one cause than another. A bowel cancer charity is not working to stop lung cancer. And a charity working to protect the rights of separated father's should not have to campaign against domestic violence.
> they’re trying the shove our throats down all the time
Ironic that you say this, yet you've clearly not actually listened to women's rights activists, because men's disproportionate deaths due to mental health/suicide is a major feminist talking point.
This forum is generally open to considering contrarian ideas, however, your intensely lazy phrasing and lack of any real argument does not contribute to the discussion here.
"Some women's rights advocates have a blind spot, causing (named negative effect of said advocates' policies that can be sourced or is commonly agreed), and this could be an opportunity to address those in light of the disease's disproportionate effect on men". - Not really a statement I agree with, but one I would at least listen to.
And, as has been noted, plenty of advocates have pointed out the negative impacts of ["patriarchy", "traditional gender stereotypes", "etc"] on men, like smaller social circles and support groups in elderly men and the expectation to take on dangerous jobs (logging, for instance). Are you aware of these efforts?
Why your being downvoted I will never know. Hacker news is embarrassing to be a member of sometimes.
The OP you responded to was absolutely lazy with the phrasing and hardly made an argument. You did the opposite and they downvoted you more. What the hell guys?
How much higher will the rate of death be in 2020 compared to 2019? Some people that dies from/with Covid would have died from something else just days/weeks/months later, but not all of them. But how many are “extra” deaths?
I’m not saying the answers should influence our policy decisions necessarily, but it’s still an interesting question.
With the recent movement restrictions I would also expect the car crash death rate to fall considerably so the numbers might be skewed. For 2018 there were 25100 deaths reported for the 28 EU states [1].
I think we'd need a "healthy years lost" analysis to see this. Take the residual expected lives of each cohort and guess how many of those years are lost due to the illness. Similarly some kind of measure for the weeks in hospital and potential permanent damage from surviving.
You may be interested in this, from Public Health England. This is mostly about flu (of all strains), but it also includes MERS-CoV, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), rhinovirus, adenovirus, human metapneumovirus (hMPV), parainfluenza and other general respiratory illnesses.
It gives an idea of how complicated it can be to work out the additional mortality caused by a disease.
Using a year is arbitrary. Everyone eventually dies, so there are no "extra" deaths, only premature deaths. I think it's better to look at expected lifespan decrease.
Incidentally, the leading direct cause of death for children and young adults, drivers, is curtailed by shelter in place restrictions. Deaths from air pollution will most likely fall as well.
I guess there's even a slight chance that it will be a lower rate in some countries, due to people staying at home, air being cleaner etc. - at great cost for the economy of course.
That confused me too. The tone suggests they think it's suicide, but more than twice as many people that age die in traffic accidents. Maybe I'm misinterpreting. Certainly not "all too clear" though. US 20-24 years fatal crash rate: 36.3/100,000 [1], and US 15-24 years suicide rate: ~15/100,000 [2].
The UK has about 1/4 the rate of traffic deaths [1], and possibly even more than that in young people. Although it also has 1/2 the rate of suicides (no idea about age distribution though).
The mortality during WWII was 9% over 6 years (1939-1945) for Germany, which gives a comparable number to that of corona virus now. So we should compare the current pandemic to 1 year of WWII with all the misery and suffering of the people instead of talking about "normal" or "abnormal" risk.
Yeah, but one huge difference there is that wartime ravaged physical cities and buildings with bombs, and all sorts of other things. The coronavirus isn't having any affect on *physical", real objects (other than people), so it's not realistic to assume that it will have anywhere even close to the same side effects as a 6 year war. Comparing it with world war 2 is hyperbolic, at best.
Nice graphs, but I have to question if the numbers are accurate. Let's take UK stats as an example - good healthcare, good coverage of testing, moderate panic levels.
11,658 cases as of writing. 578 deaths, 135 recoveries. 163 in serious condition.
1.4% critical, 4.7% deaths, that's not too bad.
But what worries me is that statistic with 578 deaths and 135 recoveries. This is probably because there's a lot of unreported cases, maybe 10,000 people feel sick, stay at home, don't want to tell anyone, and a portion of those die because it's too late, or have an asthma attack classified as Corona. But it looks like a 80% mortality rate from this really pessimistic angle. What am I missing here?
Recovery rates are not uniform, and more ill patients die faster than well patients recover.
#deaths/(#deaths + #recoveries) will overestimate CFR, and #deaths/#cases will underestimate CFR. The final result will be somewhere in the middle, around 1-1.5%, unless the hospital system gets overloaded in the UK.
I'm not sure I agree with "good coverage of testing". As of today (27th Mar) there have been roughly 100,000 people tested out of 66,440,000. That's a mere 0.015% of the population tested. I think that's around 1 out of every 6,600 people (unless my maths are wrong).
They aren't even testing all people with symptoms yet here. Only if they are severe or the patient is high risk.
The temporal dimension. Comparing the deaths now to the infected now doesn't make a lot of sense. (I would question whether the UK has good coverage of testing.)
The statement is a nieve one to say the least. While the discussion revolves around math and y axis etc, here is the simple math: due to covid I have 12-18 months left before I die.
I like how I was downvoted here by some number crunchers for bringing a bit of humanity to the discussion. I guess I should have mentioned something about javascript and an illegal business plan (uber, airbnb etc)
Conspicuously absent from all these armchair "normal risk" discussions is the impact of living the rest of ones life marred by complications (such as painful glass like lesions in the lungs) after surviving.
Yes, the author of that is a conspiracy but that wants to think they are smarter than everyone else..."The world is suffering from a massive delusion". The only delusion is the fantasy world the author lives in.
It is amazing how the whole society can spiral into madness almost overnight. The COVID histeria reminds me of descriptions of the mood among the Hutu people in Rwanda in 1994, also driven by fear instilled by the media. We still have some window left to turn back from the brink.
Ah, OK, my apologies. Generally people with your opinion are also skeptical of the epidemiological models that are driving policy decisions.
Putting that aside, let's assume that the epidemiology of this disease is settled. What would you do differently policy-wise to address this, given that you seem disinclined to favor suppression methods?
Voluntary isolation and support system for at-risk people (and possibly denial of care to those who choose not to isolate). Something along the lines of what the UK had been planning to do.
Given that assumption I mentioned above about the epidemiological model (this would be the Imperial College London study that resulted in the UK changing its mind about going for herd immunity), how do you feel about your policy proposal resulting in 510k deaths in the UK and 2.2m deaths in the US? Just curious to know your thought process for the ethical issues in a policy decision like that.
The 510k deaths figure assumes 80% get infected (upper bound given by models and no mitigation whatsoever) and 1% mortality. The actual mortality is almost certainly significantly lower - the Oxford's CBM estimates 0.2% [1], so twice as bad as flu.
Let's even assume incorrectly that all COVID deaths are on top of the 600k normal deaths. So in 2020 85% more people die of natural causes than normally. Almost exclusively very old and already ill people. It's just not a big deal and it's crazy that people think it is.
Now let's say that the death rate is 0.2% as the Oxford institute estimates, 20% of COVID casualties would have died anyway, and that isolating the at-risk people further reduces the casualties by half. We end up with 40,000 extra deaths, 7% more deaths than normally. A non-event.
If you think that the death toll of the lockdowns will be lower than that, then I hope you are right. I expect not.
>The actual mortality is almost certainly significantly lower - the Oxford's CBM estimates 0.2% [1], so twice as bad as flu.
The Oxford CEBM estimate is an extreme outlier, and I have not seen a pre-print of any rigorous work that was used to produce those estimates. That, for lack of a better word, blog post you linked to is full of spurious analyses like the following:
>Therefore, to estimate the IFR, we used the estimate from Germany’s current data 22nd March (93 deaths 23129) cases); CFR 0.51%
So they essentially just took the current cases and produced a naive case fatality rate, despite the fact that many cases are still ongoing? By the way the number of deaths is 281 now and Germany's nCFR is climbing quickly, yet they have not revised their estimate higher. Why is that?
I'll also note that they conveniently exclude South Korea from their analysis. Why are they only choosing countries that favorably support their "low IFR" hypothesis?
>The results of screenings have suggested 0.5% are infected; the true figure is likely higher due to asymptomatic and as a result of many not seeking testing: estimates suggest the real number infected is 1%. Iceland is currently reporting two deaths in 737 patients, CFR. 0.27%; if 1% of the population (364,000) is infected then the corresponding IFR would be 0.05%.
They neglect to include in their analysis that the 1% infected ratio for Iceland came from a voluntary screening study, meaning that it was not a random population sample but most likely enriched for infected cases. They then naively back this out to a ridiculous IFR of 0.05%. Honestly, are these people even actual researchers?
>Let's even assume incorrectly that all COVID deaths are on top of the 600k normal deaths. So in 2020 85% more people die of natural causes than normally. Almost exclusively very old and already ill people. It's just not a big deal and it's crazy that people think it is.
This ghoulish statement is all that I really need to know about you.
What support system do you suggest, I was supposed to have surgery yesterday. Today I will receive news that my larger surgery will be indefinitely delayed. Where and who should I seek out for a "support system"
People are whining about volunteer isolation after a couple days. I've been living it for roughly 6 months. And my self quarantine reduces my individual risk while a disease spreads fast. This is just the beginning for normally healthy people.
Both, but also with including the time spent under house arrest in life expectancy with full weight, disregarding the side-effects and tail risks of such isolation imposed on everyone, both social and economic. Most of all, with the irrationality and cowardice of risking everything for a few months (weeks?) of average life expectancy.
Do you drive a car? If so, by your logic you value your own convenience more than human lives, because driving kills over a million people and maims tens of millions more people every year.
The point is that most people generally don't consider a response like this is justified for the sake of reducing deaths from automobile accidents (I've never seen anybody argue that everyone should not leave their houses, to prevent auto accidents).
Is it any less reasonable than accusing somebody of valuing their own leisure more than human lives? The only difference between banning private cars to save lives and quarantining everybody to save lives is quantitative. Banning private cars saves fewer lives, but also causes much less economic damage. Opposing either implies some unwilligness to save life at all costs, some preference for economics/convenience over human lives.
Let's try to quantify the economic loss. US GDP is ~$20 trillion. 3 months of that is ~$5 trillion. Assuming a drop of 25% in output from completely locking everyone down (Goldman predictions), that's ~$1.25 trillion. Add the current bailout package of $2 trillion, gives $3.25 trillion. Assume near-complete economic recovery after that, most businesses successfully reopen, for the rest of the year output only falls 5%. 5% * 15 trillion gives $0.75 trillion, for a total cost of $4 trillion.
With 2,200,000 lives lost, that works out to a cost per life saved of around $2 million. With that money, for 35,000 lives we could spend $70 billion. If we multiply that by e.g. 5, to get $350 billion, that seems like a reasonable number for building enough public transport infrastructure that cars were not needed, especially since it could be spread out over years (because we'd save 35,000 people every year, unlike corona where the saving of lives only happens in one year). Hence in this case the value of dollars per life is on a similar order of magnitude for both the private car bans and the mandatory lockdowns.
The above is a conservative approach: it would be more ideal to look at expected-life-years saved rather than just lives saved, and banning cars would do way better here because the majority of car fatalities are young people, whereas the majority of coronavirus fatalities only have a few expected years of life left.
Not that it matters, but the vast majority of the bailout package is loans.
>Do you drive a car? If so, by your logic you value your own convenience more than human lives, because driving kills over a million people and maims tens of millions more people every year.
Why did you shift your argument all of a sudden from comparing the number of human lives lost to putting a dollar value on human lives?
Your original argument was essentially asserting that the OP was placing too-low a monetary value on human lives. You accused him of valuing his own leisure more than human lives, but then implied it's okay to value economic factors more than lives if the lives lost are sufficiently small (you implied this by suggesting that preventing car accidents is much less important cos it saves fewer lives). You hence implied some ratio between human lives and convenience/the economy; I was exploring that ratio.
It is not the economic loss that is the problem, it is the totalitarian control that is now being advocated with foam in the mouth all over the place. “Those damn neighbors let kids out! Put them in prison”
PRC is new model of what we should aspire to.. because they stopped the pandemic(after covering it up and letting it spread first)
>When your parents put you in timeout did you equate it with being imprisoned?
That attitude that the government is like a parent and the citizens its child to be disciplined, as opposed to a humble servant to the citizens, is exactly the kind of totalitarianism the poster was referring to.
If one side behaves stupidly and the other has power and motivation to stop it, then parent-child dynamics is unavoidable.
And government will never be your humble servants no matter how much literature you will produce on the subject. They have tanks, you do not. Shepard is never a servant of the sheep. Even though he feeds them and keeps them safe and healthy.
The best government is the one that harms the citizens as little as possible in the process of taking value from them to give it to the people that sit on all the weaponry, so they don't take whatever they want with that weaponry. Everything else is a sideshow aimed at improving the stability of this setup.
>If one side behaves stupidly and the other has power and motivation to stop it, then parent-child dynamics is unavoidable.
It's not as simple as stupid. Humans have different values and risk preferences, and all values are ultimately arbitrary so there's no objective way to say some values are better than others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument). In that case people have highly conflicting values in terms of weighing up loss of life against destruction of peoples' standards of living. People also have conflicting estimates about how much economic damage the shutdowns will cause, so even if they did have the same values they wouldn't necessarily agree.
>And government will never be your humble servants no matter how much literature you will produce on the subject. They have tanks, you do not. Shepard is never a servant of the sheep. Even though he feeds them and keeps them safe and healthy.
This isn't exactly an argument that governments aren't behaving in an authoritarian way..
Most relevant knowledge at the moment comes from epidemiology.
The most important value we have to take into account at the moment is that suffocating to death is very bad and we want to inflict this upon least amount of people possible.
Money is just a way of keeping tabs of to how much of the output of our civilisation every entity is entitled to.
We did it sort of dilligently in hopes of encouraging people to increase the output of civilisation. It kinda works but also led us to dog tailors, Jeff Bezos private wealth and cruise ship industry and various other crap so there's definitely room for improvement.
Lots of people hope that economy won't crash but will be knocked out of this local optimum it sits stuck in for at least few decades.
> This isn't exactly an argument that governments aren't behaving in an authoritarian way..
This is an argument that they always behave in authoritarian way. The only thing you can hope for is that they bother you the least amount possible while doing their thing which is taking part of your output.
You had rights because it was beneficial for the government to give you rights. Epidemic changed that. When it subsides if it will still be beneficial for the government to give you rights back, you'll get them.
If government fails, army will step in to take what they want from you more directly.
Actually, my point was not to draw a metaphor between the two scenarios I described, although that's a nice little gotcha I walked into.
My point was that equating quarantines with totalitarianism is the kind of superficial and querulous comparison that a child might make about timeouts.
>My point was that equating quarantines with totalitarianism is the kind of superficial and querulous comparison that a child might make about timeouts.
My point is that it's generally accepted that children have less rights than adults. E.g. it's accepted for parents to lock their kid in a room for hours for swearing, but it's not accepted for the government to do the same thing. The fact that it's socially accepted to treat a child a certain way doesn't mean it's socially accepted for the government to treat adults the same way.
So you simply disagree with the concept of quarantines in general? Based on what, exactly? Like, specifically cite some case law that demonstrates that quarantines are unconstitutional.
I'm not American, so I'm not sure the relevance of case law here, but legality is not the same thing as morality. The idea of natural rights upon which the US constitution was built is that these are not granted by the state or some document, they are inherent to being human; "inalienable rights". Now if you're an at risk category you could argue that somebody coming near you and potentially infecting you is a violation of your rights similarly to how somebody punching you is, and that seems reasonable to me. But I think it'd be too much of a stretch to argue "those people spending time together at a bar might increase my chance of being infected, so they shouldn't be allowed to congregate", especially when this very directly violates their rights of movement and association.
Similarly for the argument about not having enough hospital beds due to other people getting infected: the classical idea of rights was as "negative rights", not "positive rights". A negative right means you have the right that somebody else will not do something to you, whereas a positive right means that you have the right for somebody else to do something to you (or, somebody else has the obligation to do something for you). Positive rights necessarily impinge on negative rights. Since requiring hospital care is a positive right, not a negative right, approaching it from a system of negative rights one wouldn't have any right to restrict other peoples behaviour under the justification that it would improve your access to hospital care.
Inalienable rights are not without limits, at least within the American system of governance. You have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater and endanger others' lives.
Similarly, you have the right of free assembly, but not when it puts others' lives at risk.
And regardless of the legal/moral distinction, I would suggest that these limitations are both legal as well as moral.
>Inalienable rights are not without limits, at least within the American system of governance. You have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater and endanger others' lives.
Personally I don't support quarantine because I believe a negative-rights-based system produces the best outcomes in the long term. Yes it might do worse in a pandemic like this, but it also severly limits the possibility of other worst-case outcomes like the hundred million people killed by Mao and Stalin, the Cambodian genocide, Hitler's atrocities. If the countries involved (and by extension their governments) had been absolutely committed to the protection of such negative rights (and had institutions that made it extremely hard to violate these rights, a strong court system and constitution), they could never have justified the atrocities they committed.
Yes, people have ignored it and now suddenly people read the NYC news and get crazy. That's definitely true, but it is not like we didn't know about it... It has been 3 months since we were warned about this.
That's a particularly offensive comparison given that the outcome was mass murder. But it is useful to recognise that media have a responsibility in their distribution of fear.
- The linear graph shows a linear increase for Covid mortality vs. an exponential one for normal deaths.
> So, roughly speaking, we might say that getting COVID-19 is like packing a year’s worth of risk into a week or two. Which is why it’s important to spread out the infections to avoid the NHS being overwhelmed.
These numbers, afaik, are just wild guess-estimates. The real numbers are still not known because we are yet to have a breakdown from an country that went with herd-immunity and see how that did pan-out.
But the real question is: Is the mortality rate, overboard, increase and if so, is it increasing significantly.
Italy is recording ~700 deaths per day. But ~2.000 deaths per day happens on a regular basis. If we were to pack a year of deaths into a two weeks slot, then we should see ~40.000 deaths every 24 hours. We are clearly very far from there.
It's surprising that no country is doing that but what we should do is test people randomly. That will estimate the % of the population that is currently infected with Covid-19 and determine a more accurate fatality rate.
It's very possible that the Covid is a nothing-burger really and the recorded deaths would have died naturally anyway.
In the early phases, random testing to estimate what proportion of the population are infected is prohibitively expensive - you'd need to test hundreds of thousands to find just a few infected.
In the later phases, you want to know who has been infected, yet the commonly available test in fact measures who is currently infected (ie. It can't detect those who are still liable to get infected, which is what you need for good modelling).
Antibody tests which are being prototyped by many groups should fill this need.
Even testing 100 people would still be informative and give you an upper and lower bounds on the number infected. You don't need an exact number to form policy.
We can only test for active infections, not past infections. The disease is still rare enough to not allow for sparse testing but common and infectious enough to spread quickly. The disease is still not fully known. The disease can take up to (or longer) than 14 days to show the symptoms to show that we should test a person. The disease can spread from non-symptomatic persons.
Can't you see how these factors mean that testing 100 people would not lead to a proper representative sample?
I don't think 100 people would be enough to properly and statistically test for a common cold, much less for a disease like this.
Yes. If I get all the medical care I need, then I have only an 0.15% chance of dying. (Well, more than that, because I'm male, and our numbers are twice as bad.)
But I have a 4.9% chance of being hospitalized, which generally means supplemental oxygen and an IV. And if we let this disease just burn through the population, then my state would be looking at something like 13,000 hospitalizations for 700 beds. And the numbers get much worse for older people.
Personally, I could live with an 0.15% chance of death. But a 4.9% chance of getting stuck in a field triage hospital with inadequate care, struggling to breathe? Not so much. And what about my older relatives?