I manage a fund for a living and have been doing this stuff for a while. I'm generally an optimist...and I've never been more terrified in my life than now. This makes 2008 look like a keg party. We have a health crisis and the prescription from government has been to induce an economic crisis, one that's possibly (and increasingly more likely) orders of magnitude worse than anything we've ever seen, including the great depression. We are committing suicide. This is a battlefield triage situation, you save the soldiers you can and read the others their last rights. It makes me utterly sick to say that, but that's the grim reality. We need to immediately change our approach and adopt what the UK is doing. AMA
So Weird, reading your comment reminded me of how this is similar to how the immune system of an infected host can react with such ferocity that it kills the host. Like a Cytokine storm or a persistently high fever.
Imagine if our reaction to this disease, to prevent human death and suffering... will cause so much poverty, hardship, and social instability that the outcome is more human death and suffering, than if we had just let the virus run its course and had just gone about our daily lives accepting the losses.
I sure hope we are doing the right thing. Makes you wonder.
people dying everywhere (which, with a hopeful 2% letality is still very likely) will also heavily disturb the peace as well as the economy. As long as we are not sure about basic things like that, I'm quite for a lockdown, because a 7% letality is still not off the table (with happy things like reinfection) - and this is basically about double the loss of life of WW2 (which at least had a clear winner, being able to play out its game).
So: how are you sure that the parameters of the pandemic are something, the system can handle? Is there any precedent for that? What reason is there, that our society (that's the people, making up this system) can't overcome this crisis with something different?
It isn’t clear that the corona virus will have a noticeable effect on death rate in any specific city, region, or country. It would have to kill a lot more people before it even showed up in the statistics in a place like Wuhan that has gotten the brunt of it, I think.
so, only a fraction will be infected? What's your evidence for that assumption? Or it's burnt out in Wuhan? How can Italy have like the same fatality number for _a lot_ less people? Basically we don't know and we've been following experts claiming "it's a flu" for about 3 months. Then people started dying in Wuhan, Iran, Italy? Don't you think that we should maybe try something different now?
For the death rate to rise, a lot of people have to get infected and die. Keep in mind there are a lot of deaths from everything else, so for the corona virus to bring that overall death rate number up in any meaningful way, it would have to be huge.
death rate (mortality) of the total pouplation is around 1-2%/year. Yeah, the coronavirus would have to be huge to increase that - but what is your evidence that it's not being able to get as huge?
