Update: A rebuttal from a Swede over what he feels were unfair statements from the NYT. He does a pretty good job of it. Pertinent to this post, he notes that Swedes are considerably shut down, but are doing this voluntarily, according to their own decisions, rather than by government mandate. This has been pointed out before, but I recall Swedes didn't think other countries, including America and the UK in specific, could do it. Interesting reading.(Note: The beach photo is taken to make everyone look closer together than they probably are, and this is likely intentional.)
"Unknown" commented under the recent Suicide on the Sidebar post and had an interesting run at the possible suicide numbers. In my own online reading, sometimes I don't read comments, sometimes I read them and may comment once, sometimes I go back to the comments to stay in a conversation. I am sure that is true for you as well, so you might not have seen what he wrote. It's speculation, but still recommended.
It reminded me of the difference between the natural shutdowns that have occurred because of businesses and individuals self-protecting against a novel virus and the government lockdowns over and above that, imposed on us by elected officials. If no government at any level had ever even offered guidelines, let only issued mandates resulting in businesses not being open, every country would still have taken a severe economic hit. Lest we lose focus on the fact that it is China, not our fellow Americans, which is the primary culprit here.
Conservatives make this error more frequently, because in our current climate they are more usually (though not always) trying to make the point that the government lockdowns were in no way worth it, and they pad the economic damage numbers by running these two together. We need to keep these things clear or our thinking will not be clear. There is also the running tendency to treat the current number of deaths from C19 as somehow the "natural" amount for comparison to the annual influenza or even exceptional events like the Hong Kong Flu, as if it could not have been far, far worse had we done nothing. I am getting away from my original point here, but it does flow from the previous thought.
It is common to sneer at the initial estimate from a single (though important) source of up to 2M dead as an example of why we should not listen to experts, always put in quotes. But if Trump had not shut down international flights into the US in what seemed a premature move at the time but now looks a little late, had not shut down many federal offices later, and had governors also simply taken an attitude of "Okay kids! You're on your own," maybe that number wouldn't look so crazy. Well, individuals would be shutting down on their own at that point, but even so, the number of deaths would be worse. Yes, I have seen the arguments that it's going to be the same number of cases, and thus approximately deaths, no matter what we do, because it will catch up with us anyway. I am not convinced of this by a long shot. Deaths would be worse, though we have little idea how much.
Which is still not to say that we didn't put in unnecessary restrictions. Different post. I don't want to muddy the waters here. I just want to note that people who are ordinarily on my side of things are being lazy with the data and their references to it.
4 comments:
The epidemiological community (as in modelers and planners) has not distinguished themselves. Models with uncertainty bands of several orders of magnitude should never be used for public consumption but for insight to potential trends by planners. No idiot except a celebrity obsessed public servant would put a website up that pretended to show precise curves for each state (IHME). This was at the same time the we gave our politicians a free pass to play benevolent dictator with predictable results. For my business we sweated this year to keep going with out laying off anyone while the local public employees were at no risk at all. No wonder we don’t trust them.
I used to work for an engineering manager you made you write down the exact question you were trying to solve on his blackboard before any discussion. If you could not do this you were kicked out until you knew what your goal was.
Our government leaders at all levels could not clearly answer that question. Is it flatten the curve, eradicate the virus by quarantine (seems to be the current philosophy here in New England but impossible), drop it to a de minimus level?
Everyone in the press focuses on a “second wave’ of infection which may or may not occur. What is 100% sure is a second economic crisis around September when the next group of businesses bite the bullet and either go bankrupt or lay off thousands. Just add up losses in aerospace, airlines, retail, travel, real estate (commercial) and hospitality. Autos, consumer goods and others are the next to go. The public will not put up with another shutdown as all confidence is lost. So our leaders have to figure out what is their goal and gain wide public support for it.
I probably should have made clear that when I said I "assumed . . . all the excess unemployment is because of the government lockdown mandates." that was a spherical cow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
My thought was model the extreme of one scenario and compare it to the other scenario. If starting at the implausible extreme high end of predicted lives lost to lockdown via suicide and comparing to the extreme low end of lives saved by lockdown and lives saved is still many orders of magnitude better, there's not much point getting into the finer detail.
I agree--some businesses were going to take a hit just because people really, really didn't want to walk into their premises. Mostly I'd prefer to see businesses work this out with their own customers, which is what I'm seeing happen a lot now in Texas, where only bars are closed and other businesses are testing the waters to see what restrictions their customers will demand (on the security side) or tolerate (on the convenience side). We'll never know for sure how much of a hit businesses would have taken naturally, though state-to-state comparisons may give us some notion.
One thing to remember is the initial 2 million(high end) death estimate included mitigation practices.
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