It is an excellent point that at least some experts were predicting deaths up to as many as 2.2 Million and we are clearly not getting anywhere near that. How many we would have hit without our dramatic precautions is unclear, but that 2,200,000 is looking like a considerable overshot at this point.
There's another side to this. A month ago people were saying "it's just the flu" - some people on the fringe are saying it's just old people having colds and they are blaming C19 to cover up the 5G damage, but even discounting them - I was profanely telling them it's not. Then it was "a bad flu season." I also hear that the C19 numbers are wildly overestimated, because most of these folks were going to kick off pretty soon anyway, what with having "underlying conditions" and all that.* People quote the ranges, one set being 3K-48K per year of influenza, another set being 18K-61K. But that 61K was an outlier. An average flu season is deaths in the mid 20's. So we are going to quickly get to triple that, and maybe quadruple it. Even without a re-emergence in the fall. The theories that herd immunity is going to save us if we just let it happen are just that, theories. That didn't happen with smallpox until we artificially produced herd immunity with a vaccine. Everything else we vaccinate against is a counterexample to that theory.
Still, it could be true. Herd immunity is what happens with everything else. The theory isn't crazy or even untrue. It's just not always true.
Maybe we should really press to reopen soon. People's jobs are important, and I believe those accounts that each business has a point of no return, and more of those happen every day. We were down to a ridiculously low 3.5% unemployment and are now at a ridiculously high 16%. Even an immediate reopening will not bring us back to that first number for a long, long time. If we can get to 7% in 12 months it would be great. Those are real lives, real hopes, real careers. It is not a catastrophe on the level that just about every other American generation has faced, but these things are relative. It is worse than anything most of America has seen. We saw 11% in 1981, and 10% in 2010, and knew those were bad.
But I just can't get away from the very recent history that many of those "just the flu" people are now just walking away whistling, pretending they never said that, exactly. Yes, the experts, who you love to put in quotation marks - were wrong. So were you, but you are conveniently forgetting that now. We're at 60K and still going, and we don't know what happens from here. I keep reading people who state authoritatively what the usual course of infectious diseases are, and immediately can think, from my own limited knowledge of history, that smallpox wasn't like that. What else, then?
We may just have to live this way from this point forward. We may have entered a world in which the horrible contagions that keep coming out of China century after century just continue, just faster, and we have to put up with it because the alternatives are worse. It is such an interconnected world at this point that we all might be living in an elevator, they just don't know it yet in South Dakota because it's still two decades away. We may just have to accept more death as a tradeoff that is already baked in, that we couldn't stop even if we wanted to. And as other medical advances outweigh it, it may not even be more death overall, just a slowing in the general improvement.
Just don't try to prove it to me with bad reasoning. I know I am biased by my attachment to hospital thinking, where people work hard to reduce risk because it's the other people in the room who are in danger, especially in the context of HVAC and viral load, but that is actually a lot of people in this country. Each increase in overall risk is magnified for them personally.
*The numbers out of Massachusetts are that only 60% of the fatalities were ever hospitalised for any of these underlying conditions, so it includes a lot of diabetics and hypertensives who had been successfully treated outpatient with medications by their PCP, but now they're dead.
5 comments:
Experts are excellent at understanding what happened. Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
I don't know any of these people, and I wonder how their discussions would differ if they were talking to other experts and not to the media.
I expect that loosening social restrictions will cause a second wave, then a third wave, then a fourth wave. It'll be a couple-three years before anything approaching herd immunity has any benefit for the the vulnerable. Unless a really effective vaccine is invented. But vaccines don't work as well for the elderly so maybe not even then.
In the hospital, with the elderly prior to Covid, we just dealt with it. Old lady comes in with X symptoms, we try various things that have worked in the past and maybe they work again this time and maybe they don't. Eventually with Covid we will reach that point. It'll be routine.
It's not influenza (a different family of viruses), but COVID-19 is equivalent to a bad flu. And you can start to get a sense of where it's going. You can't use total accumulated cases, because the CDC keeps changing the definition of a case, and current numbers cannot be compared to previous numbers. You don't know how case numbers are tracking.
Deaths are also being redefined, but the numbers are more comparable. Moreover, there is a distinct downtrend in new deaths, and the accumulated total is clearly heading towards a plateau, which means we are approaching an end to the pandemic, even in NYC.
The question is whether we can get out of the current Great Depression quickly. Unemployment is NOT 16%. That's a number that reflects out of date unemployment compensation applications. We shut down fully a third of the economy, so actual unemployment today is at least 30%, and it might be 40%. Second quarter GDP is also likely to be down 30% or more. And the stock market is down 25%. Those numbers are worse than 1929, and unemployment already is greater than it was at the peak of the Great Depression.
If the shut downs end over the next month, we might get a sharp recovery. If the shut downs last through the summer into the fall, there will be no recovery.
I was glad to see Trump is ordering food processing plants to remain open. They were beginning to close, and farmers were facing the need to destroy crops and animals which could not be processed. If that had happened, there would have been food shortages this fall.
I was speaking to my sister and brother-in-law last night. They live in Pelham, NH, on the MA border. My brother-in-law went food shopping yesterday, and there were shortages in meats and produce and empty shelves in pasta, rice, etc. He was not able to acquire everything he needed. Pelham is right next to Salem, which is a major shopping area not only for much of southern NH but also for northeast MA, Methuen, Lawrence, Lowell, even Boston.
Here in rural OH the food shelves are mostly restocked, and you can buy whatever you want, although not all brand names are back.
In retrospect, the lockdowns will look to have been a mistake. And most of them were done stupidly. There was no real distinction between necessary and unnecessary businesses. In states like Illinois the distinction was clearly political: any government or big union business was necessary; regular commercial operations were not.
And then, as to be expected, NYC kept the subways open, and that act alone is largely responsible for the NYC disaster.
"Lockdown" versus "Opening" are not really binary; there is a continuum. Unfortunately, certain governors and local officials have taken the opportunity to throw their weight around and make things more unpleasant than they need have been---banning boating on lakes, forbidding church services at drive-in theaters, etc.
David Foster is correct. This is not some binary choice. And different government officials have handled things to differing abilities. The big thing I’m looking for is for governors to start releasing restrictions on outside activities that aren’t large groups of people stuffed together. Otherwise the restrictions will be followed less and less- We can’t go all summer with people feeling they’re not supposed to go outside. So lessen the restrictions in the safest possible way
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