russ_watters said:
Wars are local and severe impact, so it is hard to judge them in such qualitative terms -- but I don't agree that "Europe survived".
WW2 wasn't local in Europe... but people rebuilt.
chemisttree said:
I don’t think so. Russ was referring to an 18 month lockdown. Lockdown means nobody working. Nobody making anything.
That's an absurd straw-man scenario. Of course important activities are kept up.
Anyway. A lockdown for a few weeks to reduce the overall case numbers, increasing the testing capabilities a lot in that time, and then contact tracing of remaining cases afterwards
might be a viable strategy to defeat the virus before it reaches a large fraction of the population. Regions that do this would have to keep testing people at borders to other regions until this is done globally or we have a vaccine.
anorlunda said:
What are Sweden and Switzerland doing that's more serious than the US? I just checked
svd.se and saw nothing serious on the front page.
Any particular reason to pick these two countries instead of e.g. Italy, Spain or Denmark?
Sweden didn't do much so far and their cases are still going up rapidly. What I see: Banning large gatherings, quarantine for some people, better sick leave arrangements, apart from that most things seem to be an advice instead of mandatory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Sweden
Switzerland closed bars and various non-essential shops and similar things. They also banned large gatherings, some regions closed schools and universities. Their border with Italy is largely closed, the border to Germany is partially closed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Switzerland
As part of the Schengen area, they banned entry for "EU foreigners" from outside Schengen (with some exceptions), but that on its own doesn't do much.
But I'm not sure what your point is. The quote was about an estimate of the death toll in the US, given one scenario for the government response. It doesn't say anything about what the US will do in the future, and it doesn't have anything to do with other countries.
Ygggdrasil said:
Would the potential lives saved from the intervention be worth the economic costs? I'm not an economist, so I can't make that judgement. However, here's a case from a statistician that maybe we
don't have sufficient data to make that call yet.
That article is complaining about missing some data we have already:
a) The large-scale testing of South Korea, including tests not done to specifically check persons at risk. Unless the author proposes that these tests are missing most cases South Korea's estimates should be good.
b) We know an uncontrolled spread overwhelms hospital systems. See Wuhan, see northern Italy. This is different from the seasonal flu.
c) Deaths from this virus in e.g. Italy are already much higher than influenza deaths. I don't have Italy-specific influenza numbers but if we scale the number for the US by population we get 4000-10000 deaths in 6 months, or 22-55 influenza deaths per day in the season. Italy reported ~350 COVID-19 deaths on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday each. On average 1800 people die in Italy every day from all causes combined (2019 numbers). Adding 350 deaths per day is a significant impact, ~20%. Sure, some of these would have died within a year from other causes, but it's still a big change. We also know deaths are ~2-3 weeks behind infections, so we can expect deaths per day to increase beyond the current 350.
@Vanadium 50 decided to average over a month, which means including days where Italy had exactly 3 confirmed cases. Not sure why this would be a useful time range.
@sqljunkey and
@russ_watters: Wuhan got the outbreak under control relatively early. Pointing to Wuhan and saying "see, is not so bad" is misguided. Pointing to Wuhan to argue against measures to contain the spread is even worse. It's like saying "you shouldn't have wasted money on a parachute" - after you landed safely with it. It wasn't so bad in Wuhan because China used extreme measures to stop the spread.
Ygggdrasil said:
So while this thread has been focused on the relatively low mortality of the disease, it has so far not really considered that ~10-20% of cases require hospitalization, and that when hospitals are overwhelmed, mortality rates from the disease can
increase by a factor of ten.
I mentioned that quite a few times.