I have a Dysdon vacuum cleaner that may be the best, most reliable appliance in my house. If Dyson says these things work, I trust them.
If I did not already own a Dyson, I'd buy one now. What a great story of a super rich genius using his company to help the world (he's also donating 5,000 ventilators to countries that need them).
Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?
The argument I've heard is that economic hardship increases homelessness, mental disorders manifest themselves more, suicides, and other ailments. So, it's not a direct black and white count like the COVID-19 mortality, but individuals argue that there still is a "death toll" from prolonged economic hardship. This article I quickly found when I googled Great Depression death rate seems to suggest the answer isn't 100% clear:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...ates-46713514/
Here's the paper:
https://jech.bmj.com/content/66/5/41...0-8272b1ca03b4
Of course, what happened in the Great Depression may not necessarily be perfectly analagous to today's world.
But you would have to factor in depression/suicide from those that couldn’t deal with the mass suffering from the huge death toll under a reopen scenario as well.
I have a hard time believing that the follow on effects from deaths for an economic catastrophe could compare to the direct effects from the pandemic.
There are two schools of thought on this I think. On the one hand, there is the thought that you have mentioned above. Which has validity. On the other, there is the fact that they are still undertesting. So there's no way to know what the true infection rate is, nor how fast it is growing or how it is spreading.
All the testing that is going on at this point is still just playing catchup. We know that it was underestimating disease wildly before, and it probably still is. The problem is that, if the virus is more widespread than folks realize, it's that much harder to contain. That's why we're seeing the spike in cases in New Jersey now... because they didn't have a real sense of the scale of the problem in NYC until the cases were already growing rapidly.
If we test 100 people and get 20 positives today, then scale up to 1000 people and get 200 positives tomorrow, it's hard to know whether that is a sign that there were 200 true positives yesterday and 200 today or 100 yesterday and 200 today or 150 yesterday and 400 today or 400 yesterday and 800 today, and so on. All we know is that as we are increasing the testing we are seeing an increase in case counts, which just reiterates that we're underestimating the number of cases today (which we already knew). So I don't know that it should be viewed as a positive or as a negative at this point.
The example said that if the prevalence of the infection in Italy is the same as its prevalence in the town of Vò, then comparing the total number of deaths in Italy to the extrapolated number of infected people gives a fatality rate of .06%. It’s just a rough estimate, intended to show that the officially reported numbers differ from this number by over two orders of magnitude. Would you have expected that to be the case? It no doubt causes the public to ask for an explanation. What’s wrong with that? Maybe Vò is two orders of magnitude different from the rest of Italy.
You argue that the authors, out of malign motives, hid the fact that one of the 90 infected people in Vò died (actually, he was the first person in Italy to die and that is why they tested the entire town). You suggest that 1/90 gives a proportion of roughly 1%, not .06%, thus demonstrating that a country-wide fatality rate of .06% must be wrong. But .06% relates to the entire population. Some segments of the population will have a much higher fatality rate and some lower. The decedent was a 78 year old man, and people in that category will have the highest rate. It could be 1% or higher, depending on his pre-existing conditions. Younger people have a much lower rate of death. In the U.S., for example, the death rate from the annual flu of those ages 5 – 14 is 0.3% of the death rate of those aged 65 and up. When we average all these rates together we get an overall rate for the entire country. One couldn’t point to a group of 100 people in which a high-risk person died, and proclaim that therefore a country-wide average of less than 1% is shown to be false.
Yeah, it's a really hard question. Would the stock market and economy in general crash again anyway if there is a new spike and way more deaths that overwhelm the healthcare system and perhaps even cause another lockdown? Seems a possibility. And if so, that might have the same effect as the economy crashing due to being really restrictive trying to prevent the spread of disease... only then you'd have the economy-related disaster AND a bunch more virus-related disaster.
Not saying that would definitely happen by any means. Just that it needs to be a scenario considered when talking about reopening the US. Just as the death toll isn't necessarily an either/or situation, the economy isn't necessarily an either/or situation either.
Has anyone cited any thing on this point? I have seen maybe people raise the issue of increased suicides, for example, but have seen no analysis. Curious if you have.
It is undoubtedly true that economic hardship is associated with poorer outcomes, but I have not seen anyone address this issue other than in an armchair fashion.
[redacted] them and the horses they rode in on.
Like many places around the country, most of the counties in Houston and the surrounding area have issued stay-at-home orders until April 3rd. Each county seems to want to come up with its own name for the same basic thing.
Harris County (Houston) is under a "Stay Home, Work Safe" order. The county judge and the mayor each spent 5+ minutes in the press conference explaining why they didn't want to call it a "shelter in place" order. We also have "Stay Safe", "Stay Safe at Home" and "Stay at Home To Save Lives" orders.
Are other county/city governments also getting creative with their "stay at home" order names?
The whole article is about the death rate. So, yeah, talking about the deaths seems relevant.
That is not at all what BostonDevil said. He or she made no statements about the validity of the 1 in 90, nor any definitive statements about the invalidity of the 0.06%. Just that it is convenient that the authors ignored it, and that their analysis was very flawed. He or she even said that the 0.06% number could even be correct or not, but that the evidence the authors used was a really poor way of proving it.
Although, given that the fatality rate is already over 0.01% of the total population in Italy, I would suggest that their 0.06% case fatality rate is probably an underestimate.
But again, you have misrepresented the argument BostonDevil was making with the sentence above.
No, 0.06% relates to their VERY back of the envelope calculation of the entire population.
Which is precisely why their extrapolation is flawed. Because (a) there is no evidence that the 3300 sample of Vo is representative of the entirety of Italy, or even the entirety of Padua; and (b) there is no evidence that the 90-person sample of infected cases ISN'T representative of the entirety of Padua or the entirety of Italy. Yet the authors have decided to suggest that the 3300 sample IS a representative sample while the 90 is not.
And BostonDevil has agreed with this point, and hasn't said that the less than 1% is demonstrably false. But the converse is true too. One shouldn't point to a group of 3300 people in which 90 were infected and proclaim therefore that the nationwide case fatality rate of 1% or greater is false. And that last sentence is the point that BostonDevil was making.
"Stay the @#$% home so this virus doesn't spread and we can get back to normal as soon as possible. You selfish @#%! that aren't practicing social distancing are going to make this take longer than it needs to be"
At least, that's what I would call it if I were in charge!
There is a link between economic hardship and suicide. During the “Great Recession” (2007-2010) suicide rates rose 4.5% in the U.S. and 6.5% in Europe, resulting in 4,750 and 7,950 “excess deaths” respectively, not to mention the misery and psychological trauma caused by economic hardship and bankruptcy.
Let’s say we do reopen after Easter and hundreds of thousands of thousands of Americans die, how strong will the economy be then? If I’m watching people all around me die I sure as heck won’t be leaving the house and spending my money.
For the most part the damage being done to the economy is the damage that will be done if we let the pandemic rage.
* Is anyone going on a cruise anytime soon?
* Is anyone flying?
* staying at a hotel?
* eating out at a restaurant?
* planning a vacation?
I know the economy is a complicated thing, but we know the travel and hospitality businesses would be the first casualties in a pandemic *OR* in a shelter in place order. It's just that simple. The longer we let the pandemic rage, the longer those industries will be shut down (either by order of the government, or by lack of customers).
Appreciate the detailed response, but it really doesn't explain if this is capability, logistics, or will. Do you know the answer to that?
At peak monthly production, Ford rolled out 428 B-24 Liberators from one plant. (Edit: Another source says they put out about 1 per hour. Greatest Generation indeed.)
Last edited by dudog84; 03-26-2020 at 11:53 AM.
I hear it commonly reported, and it makes sense to me. It goes further than just suicide. Loss of jobs means loss of health care, inability to buy medicine, starvation, malnutrition, increased drug and alcohol use (abuse), increased violent crime, domestic violence, and probably much more than is occurring to me right now.
I doubt there really could be a comprehensive study. Perhaps someone could convince me the reasoning behind it is flawed.
FWIW: I'm not advocating an immediate return to our "pre-covid" lives. We NEED to allow our medical system to catch up and resupply, and to ensure we are taking care of the health care workers on the front lines. On the other hand, we cannot shut down the economy until we have zero reported new cases. There must be a balance struck.
The issue with COVID-19 is its high infection rate. It could theoretically infect a significant percent of the US through the exponential growth in person-to-person contacts. Our gamble is that we can stop this spread almost totally with "social distancing," "shelter in place" and other measures within a few weeks or a couple of months -- at very finite costs to our economy.
Similar problem to the statement of Lt. Gov. Patrick about being willing to take the risk of death for the benefit of the economy. It's not just just his individual risk, it is the devastation, if controls are lifted, from an exploding number of COVID-19 cases and a great increase in deaths.
Last edited by sagegrouse; 03-26-2020 at 11:58 AM. Reason: Typos
Sage Grouse
---------------------------------------
'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
It also very strongly depends on how testing is being implemented.
For example, the percentage of tests that turn positive might increase because of a decision made by a local group to only test severely symptomatic people, or to only test those who are being admitted to the hospital. On the flip side, the percentage could go drastically down if an area decides to test anybody who requests a test.
There are a lot of variables, and none of them is being controlled at this point.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust