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Sweden Update
For those who may not recall, Sweden did not shut down. They kept schools and businesses and restaurants open, encouraging only those at risk to quarantine. So… how are they doing?
It definitely looks like Sweden has stabilized. Which is excellent news for those who want to unwind the lockdowns ASAP.
Published in General
That looks at only one side of the issue. Economic downturns also save lives in terms of less traffic accidents, less work related accidents, less work related diseases, less work related mental stress, etc. It’s a complicated issue.
For example, the over all seasonally adjusted death rate in March for the US actually went down.
I think most people aren’t really aware when they do that. If I’m going to be out and about, I’ll probably be touching stuff with my hands, but not licking it.
Well said. Definitely factor those deaths in!
International deaths from the global poor could be MASSIVE. Don’t forget them either.
14 feet now. Studies are making it worse.
“Destroying” is a harsh term. My point is that there is a significant degree of speculation as to the downstream health (death?) effects of a difficult economy.
To believe that social distancing was necessary, then the individual also needs to believe that this illness was really going to reach the 3.4% mortality rate that Neil Ferguson of Imperial College said it would reach. Whereas back in reality land, the people doing the collection of data, auditing of data and analysis of data according to logical and legitimate methods know it is only at a 0.1 to 0.7% mortality rate. In other words, it is serious, but not any more serious than a really bad flu season.
And the individual would also have to ignore that the WHO was not about to declare this a pandemic until Bill Gates offered up a one hundred million dollar “donation” to WHO. Immediately after that donation was offered, WHO officials reversed themselves.
Reading the subtext again, I see.
One of my kids has a chronic condition that means it takes him 5-6 times as long to overcome a viral infection as a healthy child. His principal and I routinely discussed the his germ exchange services. Add a period to the day, create another 30 potential disease vectors a day. There is a lot to be said against the factory style public education style we slavishly adopted in imitation of late 19th Century German approaches, but if Covid-19 truly creates a high percentage of chronic carriers it’s a great way to guarantee that everyone that can die of it will be given the opportunity.
When I went to Costco the other day people were pretty much just walking around like normal. I saw a few masks and fewer gloves. But mostly it was business as usual.
They were controlling how many got in (line outside was about 20 deep but moved fast), and a guy was controlling the checkout lines so they didn’t get too jammed together, but yes it was almost normal.
And the deaths from flu infections that were prevented while we were trying to prevent coronavirus.
What mortal could keep track of all this?
There is so much noise it’s ridiculous.
Very interesting. I may play around with this as time allows.
This is nonsense. Utter nonsense. Even the CDC says so.
Person-to-person spread
The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person.
No, that isn’t what I said. “taking steps to protect themselves” doesn’t mean everyone has to stay home from work.
Oh I see. Well, I would posit that though we have no evidence right now that this particular shut down of the economy has or will cause those sorts of negative results, we do know by experience that many negative activities in society increase during economic down turns. Do we not? We clearly have no way of knowing which negative outcome will be worse, but it is not out of line to ask the question “Is the cure worse than the disease?”
Right, valid point as well. I’m a very vocal critic of shutting down the economy, in it’s current form. I’m all for shutting down travel to China, even all international travel. I’m in favor of asking people to be cognizant of how they can slow the spread of the disease. That includes hand washing, social distancing, staying at home if you are feeling sick, don’t go to the old folks’ home, etc. None of that involves making my neighbor, a plumber, sit on his hands earning 1/3 of what he normally makes, on standby.
The perspective that I consistently see missing from these discussions
Just because something isn’t quantifiable doesn’t make it purely speculative. In fact the social losses and public health problems that follow economic downturns can probably be predicted with at least as much accuracy as the number of lives that may be saved with any specific social distancing effort, because we have many decades of such data upon which to build models.
We know that high rates of unemployment lead to increased rates of depression, drug abuse, alcoholism, domestic abuse, untreated chronic health problems, homelessness, and suicide. Will that necessarily be worse than deaths from COVID-19? Of course no one can say for sure, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to presume that the difference between the number of lives saved by essentially shutting the economy down for months and the number of lives very negatively impacted by that action might not be very different.
One thing we can confident about is that the economic effects and resulting social problems of essentially shutting down the economy for months will be felt for long after
I’m fine with that, but I don’t think that your comment is necessarily at odds with what I wrote.
Right. AlphaBravo, your comments above are inconsistent with everything I have read on the subject. Are you relying on old information? How is it that you have that understanding about this disease?
Roderic, this seems a very strange argument to me. You seem so committed to maintaining an extremely strict lockdown that you’re actually arguing that a recession, or even a depression, would be a good thing. We’ve been through such things before, and they are quite bad, in my estimation.
In the voice of George Costanza:
“Oh, it’s at odds, baby!”
Just a few points that I don’t think get discussed nearly enough:
While the debate rages on about whether the Bible was written by God or human beings, whenever I look at the Jewish cleanliness and food-handling laws, I laugh. Of course God wrote this or had some human being write it for him. The copy is based on information that human beings simply did not have when the Bible was written. And it is accurate to this day. There is immutable truth in our world. Human beings don’t grow to ten feet tall, and it’s not a good idea to butcher chicken and beef on the same surface with the same knife. :-)
This nurse went on Defend Utah Radio to talk about how the “crisis situation” is influencing people who have no understanding of disease transmission, no understanding of the fact that in healthy individuals, the immune system keeps germs at bay, and she tries to alert us that the data is compromised, and that we are now ripe for tyranny. (If a person lives in Calif that tyranny is already here.)
I appreciate your thoughtful comment here on Ricochet as I often feel like a lonely prophet whose words are lost in the wind.
Video of the whistle blowing nurse on Ben McClintock’s fine “Defending Utah” radio program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGZ-DW5LVCs&fbclid=IwAR2sYsfaLWS3xoy9NpjoW3-8-Ix3zDXFVgMOlhWJQF1iiof2sut-d5aIUhY
I don’t know what the actual mortality rate will end up being for COVID-19, but it is clearly quite a bit worse than the flu in terms of raw numbers. On March 15, the US death toll was 69, according to Worldometer. One month later, it is 28,306, and increasing by over 2,000 per day. And that’s with the social distancing. Without the social distancing (which, of course, we don’t do for the flu) that number would likely be much higher.
According to the CDC, flu deaths have averaged about 37,000 to 38,000 per season for the past 9 seasons. So, COVID-19 has killed, in one month, about 73% of the average number the flu kills over a period 7 months. The worst recent flu season killed 61,000 – over a period of 7 months. COVID-19 has already killed nearly half that many in only one month. And again, that’s with social distancing. I don’t know how you can conclude this is not any more serious than a really bad flu season.
Not that the flu comparison means much. We’ve got to deal with the disease as it is, regardless of how it compares to any other one. My concern is that this persistent notion that it’s no worse than the flu leads people to disregard safe practices and further spread it.
Comparisons to the flu would be useful (if accurate) when it comes to assessing individual risk. Particularly if this is simply far more widespread (and no vaccine). But yes, I agree that we can only deal with this thing as it is.
Here’s how:
First, we won’t know what the actual case fatality rate (CFR) is until we have a much better idea how many people are infected. That will take some time. Right now, in the US it appears that the CFR is running around 1-2%. Higher in the older population, lower in the young healthy population. The CFR for seasonal flu is usually like 0.2-0.4%.
It is critical to understand that the current CFR estimates for COVID-19, however, are based only on known cases, and since the only people getting tested are sick enough to present to the healthcare system, the data is seriously skewed. This means that the CFR will only be adjusted downward – possibly WAAY downward – depending on what the estimated infection rate ends up being. It will almost certainly end up under 1%, putting it very close to the CFR of the flu.
It seems not unlikely that SARS CoV-19 has infected many, many times the number of people who have tested positive for it, which means it may well actually end up having a significantly LOWER case fatality rate than the flu for most individuals, even if a higher CFR than the flu for older, sicker people.
Ok, so it’s worse than flu in final death toll, but maybe better than flu in the deaths/infections rate.
One of these things is not like the other. The large hospital systems (and I don’t know why you only mention large ones) are not agencies, they are largely for-profit which run lean and efficient operations where having excess inventory is a financial handicap. One of the long-term impacts of this episode will, along with accelerating the exit of US companies from China, require a relook at the conventional approach to cost-cutting, efficiency, and lean supply chains stretching around the world. To make us more resilient will require adding cost-in and more inventory than business is used to carrying. It’s not only government that needs to look at itself.