Let's keep political ideology out of these conversations!

1 hour ago, SteveFx said:

I think you are quoting  me somewhat out of context.

I have consistently argued the opposite to Noel.

But I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that he is blatantly being word not allowed as was posted ( I know that wasn’t you), he is describing the world as he sees it and searching out new information and he is always friendly and respectful of other’s viewpoints and is pretty much following the state guidelines whilst querying why it is necessary.

[...]

When shown these numbers every world leader has concluded that this cannot be allowed to happen.  It should be noted that one part of their decision may be that in the peak weeks there will be terrible scenes as people try to take loved ones to hospitals which are too full to accept them. Electorally the optics are rather bad...

I originally quoted you only to highlight the point that dissenting voices are welcome, but only when they are based on all of the facts. Presenting the numbers in the way that Noel did, wilfully ignores the actions taken by authorities to supress the spread of the virus and try to keep hospital admissions within capacity. That needs to be highlighted.

I can admit that I thought that the UK's initial response based upon the government's influenza plan of 2011 made sense based on the understanding at the time. The Imperial College modelling a few weeks ago changed my opinion.
Now that early data is suggesting immunity against SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely based on a low antibody response to the virus, and that those who have already recovered can be re-infected, suggests that the entire premise is flawed.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3078840/coronavirus-low-antibody-levels-raise-questions-about

It is a dangerous argument that countries should roll-back the restrictions because the current death numbers are no worse than a bad season of flu.
As you pointed out, left unconstrained the virus will overload medical systems' capacity to deal with the severe cases. Hospitals will be left turning away cases and those who may have had a good chance to survive, won't due to sheer volume of numbers.

I am agitated by a narrative that we are tanking our economies unneccesarily, only the old or immuno-supressed die from it, that the MSM is pushing its take (it is, but that's for politicians and medical officers to address and inform) and / or the sight of spare ICU capacity shows that we have taken the lockdowns too far.
A lot of this line of argument is based on the wholly spurious China infection rate and mortality dataset. Let's not forget that this is where whole appartment blocks were sealed off from the outside world for weeks and where videos show corpses left on nearly every doorstep in those clips of Wuhan, in spite of the strict control of all media.

 

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by F737NG

If the world of approximately 7 billion people let this virus sweep across the globe without taking any mitigation efforts or having a vaccine, and with a death rate of 1.4% and 70% of the world population being infected you would have approximately 68 million deaths, probably within a couple of years. It is hard to imagine anyone would find that acceptable. Because the virus got out of control before containment and tracing would of been effective, the only other option at that point was the mitigation efforts of social distancing and shelter at home in order to break the transmission links. This effort appears to be working, but it is slow and economically painful. But to be effective we must all do our part, right now there is no other option.

Martin  

Well, Noel keeps the thread going when it seems to slow down due to redundancy.

160,000+ deaths in the United States alone due to tobacco and vaping.  7.1 million worldwide annually.  Add over 800,000 deaths world wide due to second hand smoke.

Measure that against 137,000 deaths worldwide due to COVID-19 to date.  19 cases in my own 6,000 square mile county and just one new case in the past two weeks.  And no fatalities.  And I'm supposed to lock myself in my house and wear a mask?  If masks were available?  You want me to wear a mask?  Then issue me one.

Governments aren't doing anything drastic about tobacco deaths short of saying it's hazardous to your health and prohibiting smoking in restaurants and public places.  No wearing masks to protect those 884,000 who died against second hand smoke.

Noel

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by birdguy

I understand what you're saying Noel, although I think in this case we must err on the side of caution and at least shut things down for a couple months to slow the spread of the virus until the experts can come up with effective treatments for it.

Having said all that, we cannot shut down the economy for 6 months, a year, or 18 months as some are proposing, in order to save 0.5%, or less, of the population.  Consider also that the vast majority of deaths from Covid-19 are the elderly and folks with existing health problems.  I don't mean that those people aren't important, but they are already old and will likely die from natural causes or other health problems in the near future anyway.  Yes, this sounds cold, but in situations like this one must make hard choices and do what is best for population as a whole.

I watched an interview of an epidemiologist and biostatistician in Germany the other day.  He said that the response to this has been all wrong. He said that had we done nothing, the majority of the population would have contracted the virus but most would have only mild flu-like symptoms and would develop immunity to it.  About 1-2 million people worldwide would die in this scenario.  He said that by implementing the containment measures we are just prolonging the problem and actually preventing people from developing a natural immunity.

I don't know if he's right, but the point is that other scientists and doctors do have different opinions on what our response should be to this virus.  The fatality rate of 2-3% is also in dispute. I have heard other doctors who say it is closer to 0.3-1.0%, which is still bad but more in line with Influenza.

Lastly, do not forget that 35,000 people in the U.S. alone died from the Swine Flu in 2009, and 30,000-50,000 die from Influenza in the U.S. every year.  Perhaps had we not taken the extreme containment measures for Covid-19 the number of deaths would be much higher than those numbers for the other viruses, but how much higher?  No one really knows for sure.  Do we tank our entire economy in order to prevent an additional 50,000, or 100,000, or 200,000 people from dying?

Shutting down everything for a long time would ultimately destroy our civilization and many more deaths and utter misery for billions of people would result from that.

Difficult questions for which there is no easy answer.

 

Dave

Dave, is it your serious contention that much higher death rates — say, in the millions in the United States — while you had an uncontained pandemic with no vaccine would NOT have a negative effect on the economy?

Because I think that would be nuts, but you’ve set up exactly that dichotomy: limit deaths but kill the economy, or let the weak die and open the economy up. I don’t think it works that way.

James

Sigh.....You're part of the problem Noel. I'm sorry that you don't have a clue and I wish you and yours the best of luck.

1 hour ago, birdguy said:

Governments aren't doing anything drastic about tobacco deaths short of saying it's hazardous to your health and prohibiting smoking in restaurants and public places.  No wearing masks to protect those 884,000 who died against second hand smoke.

Governments collect taxes on tobacco products. So why kill a major revenue source? Nicotine is highly addictive and removing tobacco from legal sales will result in a huge black market. 

1 hour ago, birdguy said:

Well, Noel keeps the thread going when it seems to slow down due to redundancy.

160,000+ deaths in the United States alone due to tobacco and vaping.  7.1 million worldwide annually.  Add over 800,000 deaths world wide due to second hand smoke.

Measure that against 137,000 deaths worldwide due to COVID-19 to date.  19 cases in my own 6,000 square mile county and just one new case in the past two weeks.  And no fatalities.  And I'm supposed to lock myself in my house and wear a mask?  If masks were available?  You want me to wear a mask?  Then issue me one.

Noel, you keep quoting death figures as if they are comparable. They are not.
There is a lot of work being done currently to stop the virus spreading to your county and keep the total number of infections at any one time down.

The real test is going to be opening up after lockdowns and what the rate of spread looks like with the second wave of infection.

If masks become widely available and are widely used, hopefully the transmission rate will be a lot lower and permit economies to open and remain that way.
If not, we'll see a rinse and repeat of the past 4 - 6 weeks with subsequent lockdowns reimplemented.

It's one thing having 'some of the old and frail' die, it'll be quite another when it's the young and healthy because of the sheer numbers needing treatment. That will hit the economy hard too.
 

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

Governments aren't doing anything drastic about tobacco deaths short of saying it's hazardous to your health and prohibiting smoking in restaurants and public places. 

The comparison is seriously flawed, smoke and may kill yourself is a personal decision, because you are not a threat for others like having the virus.

10 hours ago, SteveFx said:

He has done lots of research and is trying to understand from his own perspective whether the sacrifice being asked is worth it.

I agree to this extent - we're all trying to come up to speed in various ways.  I'll admit that the first time I saw someone in my local area wearing a mask - which was very early on, before there were any cases in the region - my first reaction was that it was overkill.  I changed my mind in the course of the next couple of days. So it does take people time to process what's in fact a very new phenomenon for all of us.

I think we get frustrated to the degree that we all seem to keep repeating the same points at each other.  But, again, it's a process. So I'm always happy to react to peoples' facts and present the facts as I understand them.

@birdguy does make an interesting point, which is that there are levels of mortality from a variety of causes that society is willing to accept.  It's a topic that's discussed at length by policy planners, economists and ethicists.  Smoking may not be the best example because over time, society has decided that there's a shared social cost - for example, the impact of smoking on a variety of underlying health issues - that greatly burdens the healthcare system, and that we all have to pay for in various ways in the form of taxes to support public hospitals and public health programs, higher premiums for private insurance, etc.  So smoking has been made subject to a progressively more severe series of restrictions.

A more provocative example might be highway deaths.  Some countries, like the U.S., are willing to accept a certain number of highway deaths because more stringent licensing and enforcement would restrict mobility, and there'd be an economic price for that.  Other countries accept the economic hit and require much more stringent driver training, with the result that highway deaths are lower.  You can have a lively debate about how to come out on those tradeoffs.

The ongoing problem, though, with the argument that covid death totals are lower than for other conditions is that it mixes apples and oranges.  What's left out are the main issues with a pandemic, which are time and the amount of contagion.  In other words, a pandemic starts small and grows explosively.  So the death totals today don't convey the same information as the annualized death totals for established, non-contagious diseases like heart disease and diabetes, or for traumas like highway deaths.  The main issue with covid isn't the total today but what the total might be in two weeks or a month based on what we know about how widespread it is and how fast it's growing.  So in planning for it, you have to follow Wayne Gretzky's famous advice and skate to where the puck is going to be.

The challenge related to that is healthcare system capacity.  A large number of people have heart attacks but those heart attacks happen at a steady, stable, predicable rate throughout the year.  The healthcare system is built to accommodate that rate - because it's known and predictable, hospitals arrange to have the right number of cardiac beds, cardiologists on staff, medication and equipment (like cardiac catheters and stents) on hand.  Some conditions display seasonal variations, but those are also stable and predictable.  There are more highway deaths over the summer when more people are on the highways.  There's a one-month spike in highway deaths around the time of high school and college graduation when young people party and then drive.  But again, those are known factors and you can plan for them.

In the case of covid, it's as though everybody who was going to have a heart attack this year had it in a six-week period.  What would cardiac care look like under those circumstances, when your hospital was built to accommodate five heart attacks a day and then 300 of them showed up in your ER?  You wouldn't be able to handle them.  Your cardiac care establishment would collapse under the weight and people would die of their heart attacks before you could ever get around to treating them.

There are other factors to consider with covid, like the rate at which it spreads, the hospitalization rate, the severity of those hospitalized cases (which consume huge amounts of hospital resources), and the impact of the disease on those who recover after a severe bout.  But the main thing to focus on is that it's a contagion, and those behave differently than non-contagious diseases, even if those seem to be much more widespread at a snapshot in time.  The non-contagious diseases don't have the growth rate, therefore they don't have the system impact, that covid does.

Now, back to economics - covid is like any of those other diseases in that there's a societal choice to be made about the economic tradeoffs, specifically the question of what's an acceptable level of mortality to get to other desirable outcomes like economic health.  The problem is that - again because of contagion, and because there's no natural immunity, vaccine or treatment - you have to take the worst case into account.  A freeze on economic activity is extremely damaging, and you can't soft-pedal the pain that people are experiencing right now.  But on the other hand, tens or hundreds of thousands of dead people don't make for a healthy economy either.  Dead people don't shop or go to the movies or restaurants.  So if you have large-scale mass death, you actually have economic damage that lasts for a far longer period of time - until you can replace those consumers, which is a generational project, and until enough time passes that people forget the worst-case trauma (we're talking about the worst case here) and go back to their old levels of spending.

So the economic tradeoffs are different in the case of covid - because again from this perspective, covid isn't like other diseases and conditions.

Pandemic contagion is a different animal and needs to be handled differently.

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by Alan_A

1 hour ago, Nedo68 said:

because you are not a threat for others like having the virus.

I suppose you have never heard of the dangers of second hand smoke.

Noel

1 minute ago, birdguy said:

I suppose you have never heard of the dangers of second hand smoke.

Noel

This comparisson still makes no sense, if you live with a smoker togheter you maybe get it, but you can so easy avoid the dangerous situation, dont you think ?

2 hours ago, F737NG said:

It's one thing having 'some of the old and frail' die, it'll be quite another when it's the young and healthy because of the sheer numbers needing treatment. That will hit the economy hard too.

 

How about the young and healthy who die in our wars that we never think about because they have become old news?  Not just the soldiers on both sides but the countless civilian victims too?

Would you war a pandemic we could control?

In the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic 1.4 billion got it.  Over a half million died from it.  Only in that case 80% of the deaths were UNDER 65.

I'm not advising any of you not to take the precautions and remedies you see fit.  I'm not even asking you to cease and desist of warning and advising people of what they should do.  I am all for volunteer social distancing and mask wearing.  I am very suspicious of government mandating measures because governments love to control people and many times when the reason for the mandates no longer exist the mandates remain in force in some measure.  We lost a lot of liberty and privacy following 9/11.  I don't want to see that happen again because of the COVID-19.  I wouldn't want to get in the habit of wearing masks every flu season even after the COVID-19 dangers go away.

Besides, I'm Norwegian, and you know what they say about Norwegians...you can always tell a Norwegian, but you can't tell him much.

Noel

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by birdguy

45 minutes ago, birdguy said:

Besides, I'm Norwegian, and you know what they say about Norwegians...you can always tell a Norwegian, but you can't tell him much.

Noel

I'm only mildly interested in why people are even still trying, when its pretty clear they are having zero affect.