There's about a 3% death rate[1] when hospitals aren't flooded with sick people, and the death rate hits double digits when the healthcare system is DDOS'd by sick patients, as we've seen in Italy. The hospitalization rate is about 10%.
If everyone in the US got COVID, and 1% of them died, that would be 3.3 million people dead and over 30 million hospitalized. If the death rate is 3%, 9.85 million would die. I don't think there are 30 million hospital beds in the US, so that figure could reach over 10 million, which is 8 digits.
However, while you're busy focusing on digits, you're missing the overall point.
I'm fairly certain that the "only" 6 digit death rate we've currently had has had a negative impact on the families and friends of the affected.
If you have been left untouched by it, then good for you, but you shouldn't be assuming that that applies to everyone.
The mortality rate in the US is 1.8%. That is 542k dead out of 29.8 million cases.
That's nearly 30 million cases with all the lockdowns, mask rules, etc.
Even with that minor amount of 9% infected, LA hospitals ran out of capacity, morgues overflowed, etc. Try to imagine if we didn't try to limit the spread - by among other things closing schools.
NZs recent outbreak started from a couple of kids in a school of only 13-1500 students, and with lockdowns that dwarf anything the US did they only just managed to control it, getting to something like 100 positive cases because they didn't want to lock down completely.
Your numbers are incorrect. The case numbers are meaningless because there have been so many infections that were never officially counted as cases. Antibody seroprevalence studies have shown that the true number of cases is 2 or 3 times higher.
Schools in Florida have been open for months and they aren't overwhelmed.
What I can tell you is that the CDC now provides an “infection fatality rate” parameter in it’s planning scenarios. They range the IFR from 0.5% in their best-case scenario to 0.8% in the worst-case scenario.
A new study conducted by researchers at Imperial College London found the COVID-19 infection fatality ratio is about 1.15% of infected people in high-income nations and 0.23% in low-income nations.
The new study confirms that the coronavirus is deadlier for older people, with the risk of death doubling for every eight years of aging and ranging from 0.1% for people under 40 and 5% among people over 80 years old. The disparity between high and low-income nations is due largely to facts that high-income nations tend to have larger number of elderly in their populations whereas low-income nations’ population tend to skew youngers.
At this point we have enough data. The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US. That would translate to low 7 digits. Also, it's very heavily weighted to the 70+ population.
Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.
> At this point we have enough data. The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US. That would translate to low 7 digits. Also, it's very heavily weighted to the 70+ population.
..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.
> Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.
And teachers, and looking at how the breakdown of Italian hospitals meant a huge spike in deaths in the 40+ crowd that would have been just fine if they instead had capacity, a ton of dead parents, aunts and uncles to deal with too.
> ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.
My understanding is that lockdowns didn't really change things significantly, so the "with lockdowns in effect" is not really relevant. See California (extreme lockdowns from the top) vs Florida (a bit of lockdown from the top) and their associated infection rate per 100k, which is nearly the same.
So do you think Florida is lying and underestimating the number of COVID deaths to greater extent than California is, or the California is exaggerating the number of COVID deaths, or maybe that there's a difference in behavior between Floridians and Californians (maybe California had stricter laws but Floridians act more responsibly in terms of disease prevention).
If you don't have such an explanation, and California, with some of the most stringent measures in the US, had similar outcomes to Florida, with a much laxer approach, I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that California's approach was "very good".
There was no actual lockdown in any state in the USA, including California. There were instead these totally unenforced stay at home “orders” and mask “mandates” which people ignored with no consequences. It’s no surprise that the disease spread rampantly through all 50 states. I live in California and there was nothing stringent about the measures—while many people voluntarily followed them, they were routinely ignored by enough people to make them worthless.
Alright, so after seeing what government interventions, at least in the US, looked like in practice, would you agree with the statement "Government interventions like lockdowns and school closings were a very good response."?
Because that is the comment I was responding to, which was itself a response to a comment comparing the outcomes of Florida and California. "Nowhere in the US, and very few western countries, had a sufficient response" is a valid position, and probably accurate (with the caveat that I'm not confident that a sufficient response was even possible in the US), but it wasn't really the point under discussion.
I’m saying that government interventions were tragically insufficient in all 50 states. The difference between CA’s and FL’s responses was the difference between doing next to nothing and doing nothing. It’s not a surprise that the virus spread similarly out of control in both states.
Because lockdowns only work if you actually lockdown.
That and yes, FL clearly lied and has fired people for indicating correct numbers. This is not helped by many US states that try to record CV19 deaths as being due to "underlying conditions" instead of covid.
If you go to hospital due to covid, and then die, whatever other conditions you have aren't relevant, covid is what killed you.
I think it is clear we still don’t understand fully the driving risk and safety factors across different regional areas, let alone continents and hemispheres. I don’t know how we ever could at this time or what we could do about it.
People who claim the Florida state government is lying are no different from QAnon conspiracy theorists. Where is your hard data? What are the real numbers? Where are they hiding the bodies?
That paper is obviously data mined and using extremely sketchy statistical methodology. They’re fitting 100+ parameter model on a dataset of a few dozen countries.
> ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.
Lockdowns likely wouldn't affect IFR. It's a measure of fatality, not of infection rate, unless you think lifting the lockdown would cause a dramatic shift in infections to more vulnerable populations.
> The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US
The IFR isn't a static figure. If the actual incidence goes up to the point hospitals are overwhelmed, so does the IFR, by an enormous amount (so does the fatality rate of unrelated conditions, because resource exhaustion hits all conditions for which the same resources are used, not just COVID.)
Do your numbers account for all the indirect consequences? Hospitals overwhelmed means people with some issues refusing to get that exam that would diagnose early cancer / small heart attack / some other underlying condition. Regular checks hugely postponed or cancelled. People with existing mental issues are a story on its own.
From what I recall, I've read some interviews with heads of cancer clinics in Czech republic which is hit pretty hard, and they reported that they don't see many new patients in early stages of cancer anymore, people who come to them are mostly late stage which manifests hard, and they often go straight to palliative care. Is this some peer-reviewed study published in Nature with nice numbers and graphs? Of course not, we'll get to those numbers maybe 10 years after covid is under control, maybe. But its real people dying out there, mostly quietly without much media attention.
Pregnancy is a serious situation with covid, it can lead to many complications, abortion, and in case of serious complications for the mother, doctors at least here in Switzerland either perform abortion / force early delivery depending on age, since mother can't manage to breath on support enough for both of them (my wife is pregnant right now and senior doctor and we both got covid some 2 months ago, so this is something we checked on pretty intensively... luckily so far so good).
There is no win, we all take a heavy mental toll in confinement / job uncertainty or loss. But the risks are real on the other side too and its not so clearly cut for everyone. I don't have a clear answer on this myself.
EDIT: related to original topic - we caught covid from our little son going to kindergarden. In semi/hard lockdown, small kids going to schools is by probably the strongest infection vector. They can't keep the discipline as well as adults can. Heck, most adults can't keep up the discipline 1+ year consistently.
It's pretty incredible how easily hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, each of which is a full human life, becomes a statistic to some people let alone the millions. Don't we teach students in history classes about how easily people allow themselves to justify mass death when it is convenient?
If you actually stop and think about the value of a life in a real sense instead of from an abstract or monetary perspective, you're either absolutely horrified by all of this and your path is clear, or you're a monster.
For the past year I just look at my wife and look at my kid and imagine what it would be like to lose them. I would do _anything_ to protect them. I know what losing other family members to COVID feels like. I've seen first hand what it does to people (friends and family).
Almost every one of those five hundred and fifty thousand people (in the US alone) that have died from COVID meant just as much to someone. I want to afford them the same respect and put in at least a minimal effort to protect their family just the same.
To me, any argument based around what essentially amounts to an inconvenience being too much to ask to prevent those deaths just makes me disgusted. Dressing it up in some rationality by demanding absolute and incontrovertible scientific proof of efficacy is nothing but a flimsy excuse.
Approaching all of this with some empathy makes it easier on yourself and leads to better outcomes for everyone. I'm not stuck at home in the face of statistics and arguments about how I should be able to do whatever I want and damn everyone else paying the consequences. I'm at home because I don't want people to suffer.
It sucks some days, but it's easy to keep going when I know it could be the reason _my own child_ doesn't grown up without a father. It's easy to keep going when it could be the reason someone else doesn't have to go through that either.
So I lost a year of hanging out with friends and had to cut my hair in the utility sink instead of going to the hair dresser. That's such a small fucking price to pay relative to what this could cost someone it's not even a fucking question.
I would recommend you subscribe to your own advice and approach the disastrous side effects of these lockdowns with empathy instead of just chalking it up to an "inconvenience". There are people dying due to these policies and lockdowns and others will suffer long term negative effects. It's not just an inconvenience. People with preexisting conditions (depression, suicidal thoughts, addiction, violent/murderous) make up a significant percentage of the population. These policies will be a major factors in some percentage of them dying. They will also be a major factor in increasing the number of people with these conditions (more people will become depressed, suicidal, form addictions). Others will face years of mental and physical suffering due to economic effects.
It's essentially the same argument you are trying to make in favor of the lockdowns. Without the lockdowns, families will have to bury their loved ones and grow up without grandma/grandpa around. Other people will have long term health effects from catching this virus. With the lockdowns, some people will have to bury their (usually much younger) loved ones and grow up without brother/sister/son/daughter/friend around. Others will have long term mental health effects.
My cousin overdosed in May 2020. He had battled with addictions for a while before lockdowns but nothing to the point that we thought it would kill him. He went off the rails being forced to isolation and is now dead. His family had to bury him with no one else allowed to be present. In the same way that it's easy to overlook the impact of the virus if it has not severely impacted your family, its easy to overlook the lockdown effects if you and your family have not been severely impacted.
Stopping to think about the value of a life in a real sense should horrify you by all of the deaths and suffering caused by the virus but it should also horrify you to think of the value of the lives taken/affected by these sudden policy implementations. It does not make you a monster to consider both sides.
As for the clear path in terms of policies, both sides of the coin should be considered to the degree of certainty we know the risks to be. Unfortunately, this usually does require you put abstract/monetary/years-of-life-lost statistics in play.
It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback when we’ve had a year of figuring out how to treat the disease and reduction in use of ventilators, which was killing people.
Last June, my aunt in nyc was stacking bodies like cordwood in the back of trailers. They weren’t all 90 year old diabetics with copd.
And an 8 digit body count would be impossible in the US for a disease with a >99% survival rate. So quit the hyperbole.