We didn't lock down for the Hong Kong flu or similar pandemics, because the damage caused by a lockdown is immense. Health damage caused by delayed cancer screenings and organ transplants. Psychological damage caused by lockdown and unemployment. Unbelievable economic damage. How to respond to a pandemic is a trade-off.
People die in traffic accidents every day. Do we set a nation-wide speed limit of 5 MPH? No. Of course not. We accept that the benefit of travel are worth it, and we strive to make travel safer because every death is a tragedy. That's a balanced approach. For mild pandemics we should also seek such a balanced approach where we protect the old and the vulnerable and let everybody else live life as normal.
Hong Kong flu was significantly less deadly than Covid in United states, perhaps 3 to 10 times. NYC death rate is at least .2% which would translate to 600 000 death across the US, and that is a very rough estimate. Even more importantly without lockdowns you'd get even worse clusterhell in the hospitals, which would have to do triage between neverneding stream of Covid patients and "normal" patients, who need an urgent surgery, and that would lead to enormous death rate rise so your argument is backwards actually.
At least a million people died of the Hong Kong flu. Much more as a percentage of the world population. And Covid19 doesn't seem to take hold anywhere in the pacific rim, regardless of policy. Lockdown or not, masks or not, good or bad hospitals, it doesn't matter. None of the countries in the rim got hit hard. This tells us it's all about herd immunity, and about getting there with as few casualties as possible.
NYC locked down after peak infection; completely pointless. If you're going to lock down you have to do it way early, before the virus has spread everywhere. Sweden didn't lock down. Did we see uncontrolled spread there? Nope. The virus came and petered out after infecting a critical mass of people.
The NYC death rate would never hold over the entire US because a large part of it was the result of disastrous policy of sending covid patients to care homes, and an aggressive venting policy that killed many. Bear in mind that covid19 is a hotspot disease and some parts of the world are always going to get hit much worse than other parts of the world. Extrapolating from outlier hotspots is bad science.
I am not talking about whole world; I was talking in particular about US. It is still unclear about the final death tall of Covid, but it clearly is going to be close to a million, perhaps 2 or so. You operate with a very odd definition of Pacfifc Rim btw, USA, Canada, Mexico, Equador were all hit badly - all of them are countries of pacific rim.
Sweden is actually an excellent example of a bad policy. Economically doing as bad as their neighbors, and had enormous death toll compared to Norway, Germany, Iceland, Denmark and Finland, countries (esp. Norway) with similar culture and attitudes. Also we are in summer now, and the virus may well come back and hit Sweden with a lot bigger force, just because so much more of it there.
Not locking down during the Hong Kong flu was by the way a terrible decision. Had they introduced at least some measures, such masks and limited lockdowns the number of dead would have been much lower.
I by the way divided NY rate by 3, I counted as if all of NYC had acquired the disease. So no, .2% is reasonable expectaion, and .1% of total population of will clearly be reached within several months, it is already halfway there.
Sweden did a lot better in Q1. It was the only western European country with positive growth, and it vastly outperformed everybody else. I expect they'll also outperform the rest of Europe in subsequent quarters, but this will remain to be seen. The death toll in Sweden is completely in line with its neighbors. This is evident when you look at All Cause Mortality. Their definition of "with covid" deaths is far more generous than their neighbors, so comparing the numbers from worldometers is not apples-to-apples.
My analysis suggests Sweden is very close to herd immunity, and they won't have a second wave. The countries that haven't reached herd immunity yet can choose between locking down in perpetuity or dragging out the process for no gain. There is no vaccin and the virus can't be contained or exterminated. People in the west won't put up with a totalitarian China style lockdown.
The research on mask effectiveness is still very contradictory. The health organizations of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland all claims masks don't work, as did the CDC and WHO. Research clearly indicates some viral load is blocked by masks, but there aren't any studies that connect mask use with actual infection rates. We don't even know to what degree asymptomatic infections are a thing. I suspect a large percentage of infections happen because symptomatic people refuse to stay home, and anecdotal evidence from superspreading events supports this.
Deaths in the US are trending down and will continue to trend down in 95% of counties. There will be hotspots here and there in places that didn't get hit in the last few months, but there won't be a second wave. You see deaths doubling from here, I think that's exceedingly unlikely.
I do not operate with "all cause mortality". I look at the excess death in April May, and in Sweden is so much higher it is not a serious conversation to even dispute that.
Epidemiologists look at annual deaths cumulative from the start of the flu season, exactly because we care about total mortality and not about noisy spikes in the data. And that picture looks completely different: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EcTV1OmWsAE3kAs?format=jpg&name=...
Remember that 2018 and 2019 were unusually mild flu seasons, so many people had already outlived their actuarial life expectancy when covid hit.
I do not play in creative accounting. There is a visible by naked eye large bulge of excess death in April and May in Sweden, which exctly equal to number of counted covid deaths, and same for Norway - a much smaller bulge, exactly equal to number of death from Covid. What you are engaging in is exactly kind of accounting caused credit crunch in 2008.
Yours remind me of a comment from an (in)famous Brazilian political commenter that claimed that "more people die by choking" at the beginning of the pandemic.
Many people have made statements that didn't age well. Hopefully you haven't forgotten about the ludicrous statements made by prominent epidemiologists, virologists and organizations like the WHO. Meanwhile we could trust the news to produce panic porn 24/7. Mass graves in Central Park! Sweden is doing an experiment in Human Sacrifice! Hopefully when the pandemic dies down we'll reflect on how the media and the scientific community completely failed to inform the people.
I'd argue that this year we've learned that the percentage of psychopathy in the general population is way higher than the 2% I've seen being estimated before.
I would argue our relentless pursuit of data driven outcomes and return on investment thinking has skewed the way people think about other human beings. We are just seeing the impact of that now as we face a significant enough species impacting event.
Not to be insensitive, but we can’t assume a vaccine will be developed.
Flattening the curve of infection (under this assumption) still has a similar area under the curve... (i.e. people are going to get infected, people are going to die because the virus is not going away).
One point of flattening the curve is so people won't die waiting for a hospital bed to open up. Some of those people would have died anyway, but not all of them. Even supportive care like oxygen and intubation does actually seem to save some lives, and doctors are getting better at it with time.
Additionally, treatments are getting better. Do you want to get sick in 6 months when everyone can get remdesivir and Regeneron's antibody therapy[0], or do you want to get it during a spike where you can't even be treated?
Don't discount treatment methodologies. People who get the virus now are more likely to live than those who got it early, since health professionals are learning which treatments work. The area under the curve will not be the same if we buy time for our doctors and researchers to understand more about the virus and its effect on the body.
Well the original attempt was to close to eliminate it, like many of our peer nations have done. Since we've failed at that, it's going to be touch and go so that we flatten it.
Not likely possible unless all travel between nations is halted. Also, places like north korea will still access China which the world doesn’t trust in regards to data fidelity.
Since we can’t have perfect access to information, it is impossible to stop the virus without a vaccine (and a vaccine might not be developed ever, this might be like HIV where 700k people die a year)
This in unrealistic Sweden tried that and failed. It still imposed some limitations though, yet they have very large death rate. Besides, no one really know how susceptible he or she is to the disease; there are hundreds of examples of sickly 100+ old people having light cold and young seemingly healthy 35 y old people dying. Even more importantly, the diseases seems to have long term consequences even for the healthier people.
Assuming an effective vaccine doesn't come anytime soon, which thusfar seems a safe assumption, other countries will have many deaths as well, just spread out more over the coming months/year[s?]. A flattened curve has the same area under it.
Not the same 'died because of insufficient facilities' curve, not at all. Flattening is so healthcare capacity is not exceeded. Not-flattening has dire consequence, far beyond 'the same area under the curve'. Its the peaks of the curve that trigger the consequences.
> Flattening is so healthcare capacity is not exceeded.
Sweden avoided that scenario. Their system was strained but did not collapse. They're still on track to have the same area under their curve.
> The pandemic has put the Swedish healthcare system under severe strain, with tens of thousands of operations having been postponed. Initially, Swedish hospitals and other facilities reported a shortage of personal protective equipment. At the start of the pandemic, concerns were made that Swedish hospitals wouldn't have enough capacity to treat all who could become ill with the disease, especially in regard to those needing intensive care. Swedish hospitals were eventually able to double the number of intensive care beds in a few weeks, and the maximum capacity was never exceeded.
Furthermore while their number of cases per day has been growing rapidly, the number of ICU hospitalizations per day and deaths per day have both been falling since April. Reports of Sweden's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
> Compared to other Scandinavian nations, Sweden has experienced a much higher number of COVID-19 deaths; eight times that of Denmark and 19 times higher than Norway, despite being only twice those nations' populations
Yes, that's exactly what you'd expect from a country that doesn't flatten their curve. A country that doesn't flatten their curve will have more deaths up front, but that doesn't mean they'll have more deaths in total when all is said and done.
The US chart of infections looked like that a few weeks back; things change quickly, especially if people get to thinking they're done. A second wave in Sweden (and elsewhere) would hardly be surprising.
> Compared to other Scandinavian nations, Sweden has experienced a much higher number of COVID-19 deaths; eight times that of Denmark and 19 times higher than Norway, despite being only twice those nations' populations
This is a strawman. No one reasonable thinks that you can eliminate deaths. But, when all it takes to avoid _the majority_ of fatalities is some mask wearing, hand-washing, and effort on the part of institutions (testing, contact tracking, etc) you can avoid _unnecessary_ deaths quite well; see South Korea for an example.
I find this ironic in that the same people now suddenly believe every single life needs to be protected were the same people who supported drone strikes throughout the Middle East when it was Obama taking the lives. Now the "other guys" are risking lives and it's politically expedient, so everyone on one side of the political spectrum just joins this chorus of every life matters sans critical thought, devoid of any want or curiosity about the actual facts.
So because it was a smaller number, they’re less important? All I’m asking (and it applies to everyone of any political ideology) is where is the outrage when your favored party either allows or is responsible outright for deaths? Also, unintentional deaths are in the same ballpark as coronavirus deaths, why don’t we criminalize vehicles, bubble wrap our homes, or avoid anything that could possibly harm us? It’s a fair question in my mind.
> So because it was a smaller number, they’re less important?
On a public policy level, sure. A million deaths tends to matter more than a thousand. This is hardly controversial.
> Also, unintentional deaths are in the same ballpark as coronavirus deaths, why don’t we criminalize vehicles, bubble wrap our homes, or avoid anything that could possibly harm us?
We do the cost/benefit analysis on a lot of such things. Cars are now larger, heavier, and more expensive because we've added various things that make occupants safer. Building codes have done the same for houses.
