I'm getting the feeling, Alan, that nobody really knows what's going and a lot of both educated and non-educated guessing is taking place.  A lot of different guesses.  How many of us hearing what we want to hear?  Especially when it has been politicized so.

This is starting to sound like the global warming issue.  Especially with the 'it isn't really that bad so we don't have to make all those sacrifices'.

Noel

7 hours ago, dave2013 said:

That's *cases* per million, not *deaths* per million which is what the graph shows.

I think it's expected that with no lockdown at all there will be more cases.

The important data for me is not how many people catch this thing, but how many actually die from it.

Dave

The link I posted was for  confirmed deaths per million not cases, I put *cases* in the text by mistake - you are right it would be the wrong thing to compare which is why I didn’t.

So it’s exactly the same graph as the other one, but this time continued to today and not ending when a quirk in the Swedish reporting made it look as if they had started to dip when  in fact they then experienced a steep rise.

it isnt certain what will happen next to Sweden.  Their figure of 175  two days ago would be equivalent to 4000 deaths in a day in the USA, but if I read their dashboard correctly ICU beds may be dropping which may be a good sign.

1 hour ago, birdguy said:

Especially with the 'it isn't really that bad so we don't have to make all those sacrifices'.

And personally. I'm beginning to feel a certain sort of way about it.

My family has a history of service. Military, police, medical.......

We hear repeatedly of the deaths of people out there on the front lines protecting this "society."

Out in the wild, police and firemen mostly forgotten by now, were already dropping like flies from the incessant cancers of 911, the calls coming to us nearly weekly of somebody else gone.

Now the calls are ramping up even higher; Tow-pound operators, Emt's, police, Traffic officers.... the list goes on and so do the calls.

I spent a few hours with my distraught cousin today, a retired NYC Police commander, as she received yet another call a few hours ago, yet another officer in pain, her young daughter dead from covid.

I can see her cracking and needing to talk, sitting on the couch staring into space with the memories of all the dead, now and through the years. She's taking it harder than she ever has as the calls accelerate. "In all my years, in all the emergencies, it's never been like this..." she said.

She and her friends and coworkers in that extended national fraternity of responders were and are out there every day; risking their lives with the nurses and doctors.......

While protesters scream for their right to walk without a mask in the grocery stores, and frolic on the beach, and gather in church-shaped petri dishes, and otherwise put their own families as well as complete strangers at risk.

While blithely certain that the police and doctors and nurses will (of course) continue to sacrifice and risk themselves and their own families to rescue all too many who are sick mainly from the consequences of their own selfish decisions.

And the bitter part is they will be.

Because they have a calling, no matter how disgusted, resentful and angry they might be starting to feel at this point. They have to be there. On behalf of the helpless and unlucky, if not the fools.

Edited April 24, 20206 yr by HiFlyer

Exactly the same way I felt during my second tour to Southeast Asia.  And what prompted me to leave the Air Force when my enlistment term was up after 16 years of active duty.  15 years later I joined the Colorado Air Guard to finish up the time requirement for retirement.

Noel

Various countries are already talking about lifting the lockdowns, of course in a gradual way and by imposing preventive measures (social distancing, masks, etc). Good thing. In Italy PM explicitly said that the Country can't sustain a lockdown for much more, as dave2013 correctly suggested in some previous posts. We'll probably soon realize that people talking about extended lockdowns were out of touch with the economic and social (and yes, even democratic) constraints a country must face.

Regarding actual COVID deaths, it will take time to estimate how many they have really been. At the end of the crisis, one will have to compare 2020 total deaths not due to accidents/homicide/etc. to average deaths of same nature in previous years, to count out the people who would have died nevertheless.

Since COVID fatality increases a lot for older people and for people with serious underlying diseases, one also has to reason in terms of lost life-years. For example, people who had 1, 2 or 3 years life expectancy.

On the other hand, the economic consequences of lockdown will also have a negative impact on lost life-years, possibly extending many years in the future. This is because of many factors: in general, GDP is strongly correlated with life expectancy, then you have lost jobs, you have less private money spent on healthcare, less public resources available for healthcare, etc.

For these reasons I think the decisions about lockdown and such are much more complex than they seem, and I think the extreme positions "open everything" vs "total lockdown because we want as few deaths as possible" are both naive.

I think there are things that are perhaps too easy to say when it's just a numbers game. When lives are reduced to lines and figures on a chart somewhere, it's much more painless lopping off a bloodless percentage here and there as being necessary and acceptable.

Especially when one is not, and does not expect to be (for whatever reason) one of those affected by said numbers.

About that......

We've spoken an awful lot about numbers, but I think it's good to remind ourselves, amongst all the equations, that these are people we're talking about. People, elderly, poor, uninsured or whatever, who are likely not any more interested in dying than anyone else, and would say to those ready to essentially write them off, however obliquely for the sake of competing interests... Okie dokie, sounds good. You first!

As for me...... if the uncoerced consensus of science supports lessening restrictions, then so do I.

If it's being done for any other reason, then yup, I'm against it. Short term thinking that walks us forward too quickly, and possibly into a rebound of this virus and an even worse shutdown and death-toll later are not at all interesting to me.

16 hours ago, KevinAu said:

Sure it does. You get a whole lot less accidents, homicides and etc. when everybody is supposed to be sitting on a couch at home.

Not everybody.  I am required to work, and that involves meeting with the public, even the public that defies no-travel requests.  I haven't been able to see certain older members of my family in over a month.

Exactly the same way I felt during my second tour to Vietnam.  And what prompted me to leave the Air Force when my enlistment term was up after 16 years of active duty.  16 years later I joined the Colorado Air Guard to finish my time requirement for retirement.

6 minutes ago, Mace said:

Not everybody.  I am required to work, and that involves meeting with the public, even the public that defies no-travel requests.  I haven't been able to see certain older members of my family in over a month.

And I as well.

High Flyer it's a fact that in the minds of humans lives lost that are close to you are more valuable than lives lost distant from you.  If that were not case we would think more carefully about going to war, gun control, the war on drugs, universal healthcare, and a lot of other things.  That becomes especially true when lives versus money is concerned.  Look how long it took to pass automobile safety regulations including seal belt laws.  Even now there are arguments that seatbelts shouldn't be mandatory but optional.  Although it has been put on the back burner by COVID-19 the cost of reducing carbon in the atmosphere versus economics still rages.

Noel

 

Just now, birdguy said:

High Flyer it's a fact that in the minds of humans lives lost that are close to you are more valuable than lives lost distant from you.  If that were not case we would think more carefully about going to war, gun control, the war on drugs, universal healthcare, and a lot of other things.  That becomes especially true when lives versus money is concerned.  Look how long it took to pass automobile safety regulations including seal belt laws.  Even now there are arguments that seatbelts shouldn't be mandatory but optional.  Although it has been put on the back burner by COVID-19 the cost of reducing carbon in the atmosphere versus economics still rages.

Noel

 

Guess I was raised wrong! 😕

12 hours ago, birdguy said:

I'm getting the feeling, Alan, that nobody really knows what's going and a lot of both educated and non-educated guessing is taking place.  A lot of different guesses.  How many of us hearing what we want to hear?  Especially when it has been politicized so.

This is starting to sound like the global warming issue.  Especially with the 'it isn't really that bad so we don't have to make all those sacrifices'.

Noel

In some cases it's guessing.  In some cases it's a lot more than guessing but still less than certainty.

And there are definitely agendas in play.

The things we know best are about how similar pandemics have played out.  So the way we're responding has a pretty firm basis.

There are some unknowns in that, because we're not sure that this particular virus will track with the others.  So those are still questions - will it be seasonal?  Will it have a second wave?  Does having antibodies mean you're immune?  More work to do on all those things.

We also don't know yet what the virus does in the body.  Respiratory, yes, but some of those other things like blood clots and brain damage are new news and need to be looked into.

We're good on some measurements but not others.  I have a good friend who's a retired NYPD lieutenant - at one point he worked on planning, including work with CompStat.  He likes to say that homicide is the only police metric you can't manipulate because there's a body that can't be hidden.  But in this case, even that isn't certain because there are those questions about how you define cause of death.  And then you get to testing.  And after that there's trying to estimate infection rates. Eventually there'll be a consensus and the estimates will get better (and more uniform) but we're not there yet.

Early days are like this.  I actually remember reading the first New York Times report about what turned out to be AIDS in the summer of '81 - I was still in college and that was three years before I started my hospital job.  At first they had these cases that didn't make sense and they were talking about "gay cancer." Then they started seeing other infections and figured it was an immune problem but they didn't know what caused it - they were looking at drug use as a cause at one point.  It took a few months to settle on a virus, and longer than that to identify it (and figure out that it couldn't go airborne), and way longer than that to be able to get to any kind of treatment.  And still longer to get to an effective one.  This will be faster but I keep thinking of how that played out. 

The good news is that there are some people on the job who are HIV veterans and they know their stuff - I'm not thinking only of the obvious guy but also Dr. David Ho, who's a major researcher.  We'll get there.

It's going to be a mess along the way, though.

11 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

Because they have a calling, no matter how disgusted, resentful and angry they might be starting to feel at this point. They have to be there. On behalf of the helpless and unlucky, if not the fools.

I'm thinking about that.  I'm also thinking about the impact of all those individual deaths just as individual deaths, before we start rolling them up into big numbers.

This has been circulating on social media - with good reason:

Purely in terms of statistics - we've just crossed 50,000 U.S. deaths, which means sometime soon, we'll have lost as many people to covid (in roughly two months) as were killed in the entire course of the Vietnam war.

So even the big numbers have their resonance.

6 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

We've spoken an awful lot about numbers, but I think it's good to remind ourselves, amongst all the equations, that these are people we're talking about.

 

Exactly. But it works both ways. The present and future losses in life-years determined by an extended lockdown should also be considered. The problem of course is that they are much more difficult to determine. Probably minor for the first few weeks, but then increasing ever rapidly if the worldwide economy crumbles deeper and deeper.

In any case, I think extended lockdowns will not be feasible for a variety of reasons. Next weeks will give an asnwer.

While people are counting and calculating all of those life years, I wonder if they'll take into account all the people who, due to the lockdown, are not dying in traffic accidents murders, muggings, work-related accidents and even air pollution  amongst  the many other things that kill people under more normal circumstances.